General Re-examining The Basic Land Box

[Aoret]

This might be controversial enough that I should be posting it over at BTP instead, but here goes. The recent discussion of manabases in this thread (among a few others) sparked ideas for me about treating the "basic land box" differently than we have in cube thus far. I'm making some pretty big assumptions here about whether we're properly motivated to make any of these changes, but my curiosity is definitely piqued.

What we do now

• We all run a land box full of basics and allow our drafters to pick as many as they want.
• Most of us run double shock, double fetch for a 360 cube
• Some of us run ULD with a few extra lands

What problems do we have

• We lament three-color cards like Jeskai Ascendancy and Sidisi, Brood Tyrant for being good for our cubes but uncastable in them. As a result, we miss out on both interesting intersection cards for our archetypes and on cards that are a ton of fun and synergize well with our themes.
• We all try to include certain archetypes/interactions from formats like Legacy/Modern and (mostly) fail due to lack of shuffle effects among other things.
• We gripe about CC two drops being good but too awkward even in two-color decks
• We gripe even more about multicolored CC two drops
• Some of us are even crazy enough to run CCC three drops (often in support of devotion decks), but in practice these cards can be frustrating for our players. They're blanks in non-devotion decks even if they'd be great assuming they could be cast.

Possible solutions
The conservative approaches
A. Unlimited Free mono-basic fetches (t, sac: search for a BASIC forest) in the land box
B. Unlimited (or maybe four-of) Free monofetches (t, sac: search for a forest) in the land box
C. Increase nonbasic land density within the 360 even further. Possibly incentivize by completing some cycles like Horizon canopy or manlands using customs.

The moderate (I think?) approaches
D. Squadron non-basics within the 360. (What is the right factor to squadron by, 2x ?)
E. Modify certain picks to include extra lands ala conspiracy-like effects. I'm thinking Multicolored CC two drops + a free scars land for drafting and revealing. (also requires completing the cycle with customs, the first cards that come to mind for me are Tithe Drinker and Tidehollow Sculler)

The liberal approach
F. Free playsets of fetchlands in the land box. Maintain shocks in the 360, possibly going up to three sets (and possibly squadron them). This almost certainly also necessitates free playsets of wastelands. These changes would dramatically impact the cube in a number of ways which I'll enumerate below.

The impact of the above solutions
A/B/C would largely not impact cube composition or play. Landfall would improve, as would certain archetypes like delver and brainstorm decks (a problem we argued about for days trying to solve). I don't have much fear of these changes causing multicolored decks to take over and warp the format. C in particular almost certainly doesn't go far enough. It's already incredibly painful to work with 40 fewer slots in a 360.

E is almost certainly safe, and very appealing from a composition standpoint, but would be somewhat clunky in practice. The payoff might be good enough (as with ULD), but I'm not sure.

D is more risky, but I'm not that concerned by the idea of squadron 2. Mana gets better, mana becomes even closer to a first pick (if it wasn't already), but the format shouldn't warp much. I haven't run the stats on it, but squadron 2 might not be enough to push fetchland density as high as we'd need.

F changes your entire format. Curves would get pushed lower, three color decks would happen more, three color cards become playable, both mono- and multi-colored CC two drops are easily playable, it becomes easier to support devotion without handing "normal" decks blank picks in the form of CCC cards, shuffle effects become plentiful, and we still preserve at least some of the tension of picking mana during the 360 draft (though we certainly give up a bit). Additionally, we open up 20 slots in our 360 for other cards.

I suppose the huge assumption I'm making here is that causing your format to play more like constructed and less like limited is a desirable thing. I'm not sure that it is, but I'm curious about it. If we put formats on a consistency spectrum, we see something like:
Retail Limited -> Singleton Cube -> Riptide Cube -> Good Mana Skrap Experiment -> Constructed
...and I guess I'm curious what my option plays like, since there really hasn't existed (to my knowledge) a kind-of mostly singleton draft environment with consistent, constructed-like mana.

Conclusion
I'm going to implement F first because it's the most wild solution and will likely fail quickly if it does fail. Which of these would the rest of you consider trying? Which cards, if you were me, would you be itching to include in your 360, assuming you had mana good enough to support casting them? Which high casting cost Riptide darlings would you cut, knowing that an abundance of wastelands would be pressing your curve lower?

 

[Turillazzo]

I really want some feedback before I start implementing something but the idea of making everything closer to constructed is really appealing to me. To still be veery conservative, maybe I'll try some variation of B, which I'll call B2: At the end of each booster, every player may permanently remove any cards from his draft to grab a mono-fetch/double-fetch that has the same colors of the removed card. A player may do this only with cards drafted during that draft round, so this requires quite a lot of foresight.
However, if we're willing to add this much innovation to the cube thing, we will probably want to alter the draft process completely. I'll need more experience with cube drafting in general and especially with alternate draft formats (rotisserie, auction...) to come up with ideas, but I'm sure there will be a way.

 

[Jason Waddell]

Some considerations:

1) I really like the draft dynamic between powerful spells and powerful fixing, and if we change this we need to consider if we're adding to the experience or simply sacrificing tension for the sake of mana bases.
2) I think mana is prrrrettty good in Riptide cubes and if my deck has shit mana I usually have to compensate in other ways.
3) Counterbalances. I don't think we want a "utopia" land solution or whatever.

4) If I was expanding fixing I would go for things like Scars lands and River of Tears and things that have sequencing involved.


Skrap: What excites you about this idea and how would your cube design correspondingly change?

 

[Aoret]

@Turillazzo: I definitely feel like there's some interesting design space in your B2 idea. My thought process is for me to go out and check the outer bound for doing weird shit to improve mana, and then back into whichever implementation is the right one. It helps a ton to know that there are even more ways to do this than the ones I was able to brainstorm up with my buddy this week.

@Wadds:
1) Totally agree that consideration is needed. My gut instinct is that we actually don't sacrifice as much as we're thinking (assuming we implement solution F). Just having fetches doesn't make my mana very good. Where I do think there's risk is if picking like 2 shocks ends up being good enough to get by, assuming you get a million fetches. Maybe the way to curb that is to cap the free fetch count. I'm open to ideas on preserving as much tension as possible (and am very conscious of it), but I'm willing to trade some tension for some of the other things that I want to get.

2) Agree that Riptide mana is better than most cubes in existence. The point I was trying to make with my spectrum is, why did we decide to stop where we did? I think the answer is that cutting any more actual spells from the 360 would have been too painful.

3) I definitely wouldn't be in favor of moving as far as utopia lands. I'd like to see how cube plays with something close to modern or legacy mana, but absolutely not anything better.

4) Scars lands definitely. River of tears is a great shout! I forgot those existed and like the idea of trying to play with them.

5-What excites me) The initial excitement/motivation for me was a desire to play stuff like WW two drops and BW two drops which I'd been reluctant to include because they can be awkward. Back when I was on team gravecrawler (before my switch to 2shieldz), I also really hated Geralf's Messenger for costing BBB and was thrilled to cut him. (Black in particular has this problem a lot, historically). The conversation about brainstorm lacking fetch density got me thinking about it again, and the discussion of legacy being "magic's most elegant format" or whatever pushed it over the top for me. Now, don't get me wrong, I know there are much bigger differences between cube and legacy than just giving Brainstorm enough fetchlands to behave like it is supposed to, but I guess I'm looking to borrow from Legacy and Modern in the same way that Grillo often borrows from Pauper.

Once I started thinking along those lines, I realized how much untouched design space there is here. That has since become the primary motivation for doing this experiment. This might totally suck, but nobody else is ever going to try this if we (probably I) don't. I just have to know what it will do.

6-How will design change) I think I'm going to run it close to as-is for starters. I think I'll use the 20 slots I free up to jam in a bunch of loose, hard to cast shit so that people have reasons to push the envelope. I intend on taking this further than I ultimately want it to go so that I can just dial it back down appropriately. Down the road, I expect my curves to get pushed lower simply because of the presence of wasteland. I feel like that effect will c̶a̶s̶c̶a̶d̶e̶ ....r̶i̶p̶p̶l̶e̶ (....fuck, somebody help me pick a verb that isn't a mechanic) through the rest of the cube in ways I'm currently incapable of anticipating. I'm curious what those are and whether people who have, you know, actually played Legacy or Modern, can help shed some light on that.

 

[blacksmithy]

This is a great post, but what is BTP?

 

[safra]

6-How will design change) I think I'm going to run it close to as-is for starters. I think I'll use the 20 slots I free up to jam in a bunch of loose, hard to cast shit so that people have reasons to push the envelope. I intend on taking this further than I ultimately want it to go so that I can just dial it back down appropriately. Down the road, I expect my curves to get pushed lower simply because of the presence of wasteland. I feel like that effect will c̶a̶s̶c̶a̶d̶e̶ ....r̶i̶p̶p̶l̶e̶ (....fuck, somebody help me pick a verb that isn't a mechanic) through the rest of the cube in ways I'm currently incapable of anticipating. I'm curious what those are and whether people who have, you know, actually played Legacy or Modern, can help shed some light on that.

(the word I think you want is 'echo', particularly to get across how your changes are going to interact with each other down the line)

I have like an hour to kill so I'm gonna write a little here on Legacy mana, Wasteland, and what my cube's mana has felt like. I started with a design goal of a "legacy-lite" environment, and it's been an interesting ride trying to hone that. I don't draft enough to be there yet (which is why I'm trying to draft with people at the shop more regularly) but my god I'm closer than I used to be. A couple of your solutions feel to me like they aren't super practical for 40-card (and 15-18 land) decks; specifically the ones that multiply the effect of someone drafting a lot more fetches than other people. The idea i think should be manabase democratization, so that you can lean on lands harder if you need to but aren't punished if you don't (and build okay).

Carsten Kotter writes here that

So what is Legacy about? Clearly, by starting the card pool at the very beginning, the format is meant to encapsulate the history of the game, to allow players who have been playing for a long time or become deeply invested in the game to enjoy their favorite toys forever. Being banned from Legacy means that a card has effectively been purged from all tournament Magic that doesn't involve the variance and inherent gameplay modifications of Vintage. That's a pretty hard sentence to pass on a card, all things considered.
As a result, to me Legacy could well be described as the format of the second offender. Many effects in Magic have a tendency to break, and they all exist in a variety of forms. In Legacy, generally speaking, the worst offender of its class is banned so that the less abusive implementations of that effect can frolic and compete somewhere.

that competition (Strip Mine ruins games) between narrower, yet still powerful cards with similar effects exists on a macro scale in Legacy and on a micro scale in our Cubes (which have a significantly smaller card pool). Legacy doesn't have perfect mana, it has really incredibly good mana, with many decks not finding space for basic lands (some creature decks sideboard Life for the Loam to deal with multiple wastelands). Sometimes you'll draw your basic land, but the fetch-dual dynamic means you're not colour-screwed because of it (since you had to play a basic on t2 your first land is still an uncracked fetch to shift your draw-a-second-land odds a little higher). The ratio of these powerful lands to basics in decks varies, sometimes as a function of player budget and sometimes for design reasons, but in a format where your deck choice is super personal and you won't change decks very much, the second is usually prompted by the first. Regardless, though, it's rare to see decks running more than a couple of basics, even if they're not three-coloured decks. It's just a level of consistency that almost rivals one-colour mono-basics that can't be arrived at without the fetch-dual interaction.

So in Legacy, manabase construction prevents drawing unhelpful lands. It also brings a lot of redundancy, since you're fetching the same couple of duals in one of a couple orders. That consistency echoes through the decks themselves: you know what you're probably going to try to do this game based on your opening hand, and if you know your opponent (or are in a post-board game) you probably already know what they're doing too. Kotter again:

Games against a deck that fights on an unusual axis, especially those that successfully abuse hidden information, only become interesting when you know what they're trying to do and which limitations their plans have. Knowing those things allows you to plan ahead, to prepare for what you know is going to come, and to feel the excitement that comes from playing a game on the razor's edge. Simply put - it's all in your head.

OG duals instead of shocklands also frees up the ability to splash a fourth colour for sideboard cards. You'll sometimes see Legacy lists with a dual in the board instead of maindeck, though. At first this probably seems weird - Legacy sideboards are really really tight and usually have a bunch of clutch 1- or 2-ofs in larger suites (so you'd bring in one card against a bunch of decks but not always the same cards with it) and having the land in the board is more than just a concession to control mirrors. The presence of Wasteland in the format is such a consideration that it's actually better to not have the dual in your deck and instead bring it in for one of your basics when the opponent doesn't have an LD plan and you need to activate the good doctor's green ability or whatever. Wasteland itself has been a lot less present in the format than it used to; I don't have a firm answer for why that is, maybe someone else who plays it in their deck can chime in (i usually play Stoneblade lists and have other, worse utility lands).

My decision to run a Legacy-style manabase in my cube meant I needed a way to punish greedy goodstuff decks. It's a lot easier to be mostly in one or two colours and splash until you're playing three than it is to run WW, UU and RR cards in the same deck. Obvious, sure, but consider the implication that our Cube decks will have a 'main colour', and splash others to play cards that fit their strategy - I'm running a bunch of CD gold spells to make the decision on where to splash for value easier, since it's reasonable to run , and spells in the same deck and expect to cast at least one of them on-curve. An interesting thing I've tentatively found is that it's led to tighter three-colour decks instead of two-colour two-splash piles, which definitely came together more than I wanted.

Fetching two duals and a playing a basic (a reasonable first three lands to shoot for, imo - what deckbuilding numbers take us here?) gives you two mana of one colour (trop and volc are both islands), one mana of each of your splash colours (1R, 1G) and then the basic land can shore you up to cast CC spells of two of your three colours but not the third one. If your splash dual gets Wasted on turn two, and it's not the same colour as the basic you had to settle for, that colour's been denied to you even in an environment with really absurdly good mana. If you play your Forest (which is in your deck so you can Krosan Grip Blood Moon) and I go 'huh, not a fetchland' and waste your Volc in response, I'm playing reactively. I could proactively waste the Trop on turn two and you'd be denied , but not your colours. If that third land is also a fetch or dual, I'm actually just slowing you down and keeping your top-end out of the game, not punishing colour greed.

idk i feel like i'm just getting started talking about Wasteland in legacy and have barely touched on it in cube, are there more focused questions you wanna pose? Think really hard about how many people are going to activate Wasteland in the early game, and how many times - even two Wastelands is backbreaking in Legacy and so giving everyone a playset is, uh, a terrifying thought. The lower your curve is the easier it is to not have to crack your fetches, too (protecting them from Wasteland, since you can just get a land in response), which is nice because omnipresent Wasteland is going to lower everybody's curve in a hurry.

 

[safra]

This is a great post, but what is BTP?

(i think it's a euphemism for 'somewhere else')

 

[Aoret]

Balduvian Trading Post
(i think it's a euphemism for 'somewhere else')

It's a fictitious rival forum where the design atmosphere is even crazier and more liberal than ours.

 

[Aoret]

@safra I need to digest everything you just wrote, but great post. Will circle back when I have coherent thoughts on this.

 

[Grillo_Parlante]

Could we talk a little bit more about specific metagame relationships in legacy and how to translate them over to cube?

The penny cube is structured on a lot of pauper metagame relationships, and though I've been too busy/lazy to write an article about how that structure works, I think building around metagame relationships in general is a better way to structure a cube than build arounds or even themes.

The fundimental structure of the penny cube is built around the raw power of bounce lands and the tempo cost they elicit, but there are lots of other metagame relationships I've poached: for example the way removal has to be metagamed to answer various threats.

When we talk about shocks, fetches, wastelands, stifle, and brainstorm, we are talking about metagame relationships: the way that you can leverage those different cards to create a relative advantage in the environment, based on what you think your opponent's strategy is.

This is why I don't run path to exile, because having a metagame relationship between chainer's edict, fabled hero, and krenko's command is much more interesting than running a card that represents no interesting metagame relationship. It has nothing to do with hating good removal, its a means to creating cube structure, and goes way beyond issues of mere power max. This is the same logic behind running wasteland rather than strip mine: wasteland interacts interestingly with fetchlands, stifle, and dual lands.

We just generally don't talk about cube in these terms--probably due to it being largely a nostalgia driven casual format--which is unfortunate, because it makes it harder to recreate the feeling of how we want different parts of the cube interacting with one another dynamically.

 

[CML]

Glad someone's doing something with this. I floated an idea the other day about making Legacy Manabases a thing in Cube for free but it didn't go anywhere. Let me know how this experiment works out.

 

[Grillo_Parlante]

I finally put the money down for modern and have been just jamming grixis delver for the past couple days (as part of my slow climb up to legacy delver), really enjoying sequencing fetchlands, shock lands, and check lands.

Its also occured to me that this type of sequencing would be very difficult to translate over to cube, for the same density concerns. I don't have this issue with bouncelands, because some decks really want bouncelands, and other decks don't. As a result, certain decks will have a disproportionate density of bouncelands, incentives for drafting in this manner, and other decks can draft around exploiting that density.

So let me rephrase my question a little bit: rather than handing out free fetchlands, is there a way to break in half the way people draft fetches? Right now fetchlands are generic good stuff lands, so everyone wants them, they get dissipated around the draft, and this creates density issues with other mechanics.

I could see running wastelands as part of a broader effort to break part of the cube away from drafting fetchlands, so as to consolidate them in a metagame role, but that relationship is going to have to be fleshed out much more than four punisher cards in the land section, and three to six brainstorms as incentive in blue.

 

[Diakonov]

I could see running wastelands as part of a broader effort to break part of the cube away from drafting fetchlands, so as to consolidate them in a metagame role, but that relationship is going to have to be fleshed out much more than four punisher cards in the land section, and three to six brainstorms as incentive in blue.

At the very least, ways to incentivize players to draft specifically the fetches that are for their pair of colors. Wastelands seem perfect for this, because when playing against them you do want on-color fetches and don't want off-color ones.

Any sort of non-basic punisher would work well for this I think. Cards that punish fetches directly, too. I'd like to add a Bind to my cube as soon as I can get a copy.

This might be a stretch, but what about a custom card you could draft as "fetch of your choice" from a stack of 20 fetches?

 

[safra]

I might just throw an extra set or two of fetches in my land binder, actually. The problem is that they're so much better than the other lands there...if I bumped players up to getting four picks (currently we do 3 during deckbuilding) and made fetchlands cost two picks each (precedent's there, artifact lands cost half a pick) it might lead to that disproportional valuation.

As a caution, fetches are much better in a Wasteland environment than other cycles of duals might be. Drafting fewer 'off-colour' fetches might come from it but if I don't know whether to expect Wasteland or not I'm just gonna leave my fetch uncracked until I need it.

 

[Grillo_Parlante]

There are solid color fixing reasons for wanting to run fetchlands, and we can use multi-color cards to create incentives in that regard. Delve I think is another good candidate, and I'm sure there are more.

But what are some incentives though for not wanting that color fixing. Why would I happily pass a fetchland to another player?

 

[Diakonov]

Devotion themes would probably help.

 

[Grillo_Parlante]

I kind of like that. Its easier to run wasteland in those decks too, because they have less color commitments. Wasteland is also good tech against them, letting you push the power envelope on your lands. If land disruption, like wasteland, is condensing the format (and I think you need more condensing forces: can't expect wasteland to do all the work) than big mana lands function as a work around. Probably needs some more incentives, but its a good start.

The theros block gods could also be a good incentive rewarding simplier mana bases? Never cubed with them, so not sure.

Stifle also seems somewhat better, as it becomes more like a protection effect, guarding a critical part of your strategy. Though I think there has to be a reasonable density of strategically critical cards for stifle to interact with to merit a slot in cube.

 

[Jason Waddell]

I might just throw an extra set or two of fetches in my land binder, actually. The problem is that they're so much better than the other lands there...if I bumped players up to getting four picks (currently we do 3 during deckbuilding) and made fetchlands cost two picks each (precedent's there, artifact lands cost half a pick) it might lead to that disproportional valuation.

As a caution, fetches are much better in a Wasteland environment than other cycles of duals might be. Drafting fewer 'off-colour' fetches might come from it but if I don't know whether to expect Wasteland or not I'm just gonna leave my fetch uncracked until I need it.

I worry that the end effect will be less people playing actual utility lands. I have no doubt that fetchlands are worth two picks, but I would be sad to see fewer niche lands in play.

 

[Jason Waddell]

There are solid color fixing reasons for wanting to run fetchlands, and we can use multi-color cards to create incentives in that regard. Delve I think is another good candidate, and I'm sure there are more.

But what are some incentives though for not wanting that color fixing. Why would I happily pass a fetchland to another player?

I don't know that such a dynamic exists, outside of say Leonin Arbiter.

 

[CML]

I finally put the money down for modern and have been just jamming grixis delver for the past couple days (as part of my slow climb up to legacy delver), really enjoying sequencing fetchlands, shock lands, and check lands.

Its also occured to me that this type of sequencing would be very difficult to translate over to cube, for the same density concerns. I don't have this issue with bouncelands, because some decks really want bouncelands, and other decks don't. As a result, certain decks will have a disproportionate density of bouncelands, incentives for drafting in this manner, and other decks can draft around exploiting that density.

So let me rephrase my question a little bit: rather than handing out free fetchlands, is there a way to break in half the way people draft fetches? Right now fetchlands are generic good stuff lands, so everyone wants them, they get dissipated around the draft, and this creates density issues with other mechanics.

I could see running wastelands as part of a broader effort to break part of the cube away from drafting fetchlands, so as to consolidate them in a metagame role, but that relationship is going to have to be fleshed out much more than four punisher cards in the land section, and three to six brainstorms as incentive in blue.

yes, i like this

i also object to the name "grixis delver" when "grixis angler" or "grixis twinks" is a more representative evocation

 

[Grillo_Parlante]

Its pretty disappointing as far as delver decks go. It dosen't really have much in the way of disruption, and delver oftentimes feels like a really negligible threat without anything to condense down the game. Really missing daze also.

 

[Aoret]

@safra
I agree that you want mana to be democratized. I'm significantly more in favor of those solutions than of draft multiplicative solutions, but thought it was worth throwing it out there as an idea.
As for fetching for two duals and then playing a basic, I'm not sure what numbers get us there, but I'm open to the idea of limiting people down to this number and just capping the amount of free fetches I hand out. Likewise, if 4 wastelands for everyone is too much in a 40 card deck I'm okay cutting down the number I hand out there as well. What feels right, 3? 2?
I'm okay pushing curves lower, but I think it will become a very intricate (and interesting!) dance between allowing some higher-curve cards to exist, providing aggro with wastelands, keeping cards castable with good mana, and avoiding rainbow magic.
@Grillo
I agree we need to explore what to poach from legacy/modern in more detail, but I'm unsure of what exactly to poach due to my inexperience with the formats.
If there were a mechanical way to split fetchlands, I'd be all for it, but I don't think one exists because of how universally good they are. I think a better way to approach this is to work with the fabric of the format rather than trying to port over the same mechanism that worked with the fabric of a different format. I think bifurcating the lands is incredibly elegant, but it requires that the lands be conducive to it (which bounces are and fetches are not).
I think what does work is letting the limited space itself do the bifurcation for us. I can only run so many lands in my 40 card deck. If I want sweet lands from the draft (or ULD) and I want wastelands, I naturally don't have room for tons of fetches.
As far as incentives, I don't really feel like I'm hurting for them. Having good enough mana to run CD two drops or CC and DD two drops alongside one another is incentive enough IMO. I think it's important to point out, again, that I'm hoping to balance out people's desire to run a billion fetches against that fact that I'll likely only be letting them fetch shocks with them, and that they will have to draft their shocks. It's possible that I'll do a 2 set / 1 set split of shocks/duals. That makes me more okay with giving people free reign with their fetch counts.
@diakonov
I'm not as big on the idea of drafting fetch-of-choice because the issue is density and not selection. I actually like selection being somewhat challenging (i.e. finding the right shocks within the 360 draft), because it creates that tension that Jason mentioned. What happens when I open my UB shock and my UB tezz in the same pack?
@safra's point on extra fetches in ULD, it's possible that you could solve this problem by dramatically increasing the number of picks in ULD, and pricing fetches fairly highly in terms of pick count. I just don't like that it pits premium fixing against fun underrated lands (I agree with Jason that it's sad if we kill his baby)

@all
Thank you for contributing ideas to this. I really appreciate the help, particularly since most of you have more experience with these formats than I do. I'll definitely post up results from just trying good mana with my cube as-is, and then I hope to pull ideas from this thread to start working in themes that fit well (devotion, landfall etc)

 

[Grillo_Parlante]

What if we just go x3 fetchlands, x1 shocklands (assuming 50 land section at 360)? That seems like a less invasive way to increase supply.

 

[Aoret]

I want to push it really far first to see whether the goal is even worth achieving, then dial it back to a workable solution. Again, too lazy to do the math, but based on the stats in the other thread I gotta imagine that 30 doesn't push the number high enough.

I'm not convinced that having a high fetchland density is a thing we actually want. I want to answer that question before I figure out the proper implementation. I know I want to be able to cast colored-mana intensive spells, but I don't want to end up playing rainbow magic. To me that's the real challenge. Enabling fetchland stuff is kind of a fringe benefit.

 

[Grillo_Parlante]

I'm actually kind of interested in how a 3:1 split would play out. I think you would have more players willing to lower fetchlands down their pick order, allowing other players, that have them higher up in their pick order to accumulate them. If I can pick up 4 fetchs for a deck, thats 10% of my final 40. 5 puts me at 12.5% which is pretty reasonable.

I was also brainstorming how a U/G section with multiple stifle effects could be interesting. We all hate land destruction, but if stifle could just not feel narrow (or we run multiple voidslimes) you could have sort of a U/G land destruction deck, without the land destruction. I think it would have to fit in a tempo plan (as in stile effects being broader viable disruption in the cube), and if you are running voidslime, have the ability to hold mana up.