General When Is Fixing Too Good?

[Dom Harvey]

I'm sceptical of this Wasteland-based approach to keeping manabases in check. I don't believe that the natural inconsistency of a 3+ colour manabase, especially if it has other disadvantages (lands entering tapped, life payment with fetches and if you run shocks over duals), makes up for whatever increase in power level your deck gets from the extra colour(s); even if it does, it doesn't need to be reined in by an effect as powerful as Wasteland. Sometimes Wasteland punishes greed, but more often it punishes someone for keeping an otherwise reasonable hand by making them unable to cast spells. I don't think you want to learn from Legacy here, as the main point of playing Wasteland there is to pick up free wins in games that might have been fun. Why not Tectonic Edge instead?

We constantly talk about the need for removal to fit the environment: if there was a free colourless way to cut a villain off some other resource (cards in hand, creatures in play, whatever), we'd acknowledge that it would warp the format in an unhealthy way. The undesirable decks or deck construction ideas that Wasteland is meant to push out of Legacy don't exist in Cube unless you force them, but the more common constraint imposed by Wasteland - the bar that any spell costing >3 has to clear gets massively higher - certainly does.

I'll gladly run Fulminator Mage, Acidic Slime, and so on, but trip/quad Wasteland is taking excessive measures to solve a problem that doesn't exist AFAICT.

 

[Chris Taylor]

I like wasteland because tectonic edge isn't a disruptive element

 

[Jason Waddell]

My issue with Tec Edge is that it doesn't keep them off of their 4th mana for a wrath. Would gladly run the Tec Edge equivalent if it said three lands.

 

[Eric Chan]

I think there are plenty of other ways for aggro to fight Wrath effects, though, without incurring the splash damage to every other archetype that wants to be 3+ colours; I covered a bunch of those approaches in another thread. As I mentioned in that post, fighting control as an aggro player is one of those beautiful dances that exists in Magic, and nuking their first non-basic is like bringing steel toe boots to the dance floor.

Running Wastelands to give aggro a boost against midrange and control seems like the most heavy-handed way to go about solving this problem, and I'm as big a proponent of aggro as anyone.

Tectonic Edge has always seemed like the platonic ideal of land-based land destruction, as it gives your opponents a chance to get to play Magic, while still giving your format safety valves for the really dangerous lands - your Gavony Townships, Celestial Colonnades, Shelldock Isles, and the like.

 

[ahadabans]

My main problem with Tectonic Edge is that it never ends up in a deck list. Even though I agree with you 100% Eric that it has great application (on paper) against many strong non-basics, no one wants to run a colorless producing land just for that purpose unless it can do other things (like wasteland or God forbid Strip Mine). The main appeal of LD is hosing mana bases unfortunately. And because of that, LD often has a lower fun factor than discard, so even if I truly felt I needed more I'd try to look for other ways to address it honestly. This is a bad road IMO.

 

[Jason Waddell]

Honest question, when has an aggro deck ever run Tec Edge?

 

[ahadabans]

Over here, never. I think it's useless in aggro. By the time it's online, you should be close to winning the game (or past the point of really caring about LD). The only deck that I think wants this is one that fears something like a manland that they can't answer. So heavy sorcery speed removal / low creature count control decks. Of which, very few exist (in my cube at least).

 

[Eric Chan]

Yeah, I agree that because of its lower power level, Tectonic Edge competes with all of the good colourless utility lands for those one or at most two slots you can devote to lands that don't fix. Nephalia Drownyard and Blighted Woodland are lands I'd probably run before my first Tectonic Edge, never mind some of the busted ones like Vault of the Archangel.

However, of the times that I've run Tec Edge in my own decks, I've never been disappointed with it, even when most times I'm nuking the likes of Sacred Foundry as opposed to something really dangerous. The occasions where I'm able to nab a Kessig Wolf Run or the like are life savers, and make me think that the land is underrated overall.

It's worth noting that, like all other colourless utility lands, Tec Edge works best in straight two-colour, no-splash decks that aren't hurt by the occasional land not producing any of the necessary colours. Even if your format encourages greedy splashes and provides generous fixing, the presence of colourless utility lands offers a nice counterbalance, by rewarding tighter manabases that can support a few powerful spell-lands that the three and four colour decks can't afford.

 

[Eric Chan]

Honest question, when has an aggro deck ever run Tec Edge?

Just like with Wasteland, if your low-curve aggro deck is on the cusp between 16 and 17 lands, you shave your 24th spell and throw in the final spell land in that slot, whether it's Tectonic Edge or something else. At that point, the land doesn't need to fix, because you weren't going to run a land in that slot anyways.

For really aggressive decks, I've done this considering 15 lands, and then ending up with 16.

 

[Jason Waddell]

Yeah, I don't think it's any accident that during Standard and Modern, Tec Edge has been most commonly found in UW control. It's not really going to do the trick here.

Aggro is massively underpowered in most lists that run Wasteland + Strip Mine, so I'm not sure adding one more of such an effect is going to be cause for alarm. I'd rather go the MvC2 route here than water everything down.

 

[Onderzeeboot]

My issue with Tec Edge is that it doesn't keep them off of their 4th mana for a wrath. Would gladly run the Tec Edge equivalent if it said three lands.

Shouldn't you be running five mana wraths in your environment instead of letting Aggro players bring a gun to a knife fight?

 

[Eric Chan]

Aggro is massively underpowered in most lists that run Wasteland + Strip Mine, so I'm not sure adding one more of such an effect is going to be cause for alarm. I'd rather go the MvC2 route here than water everything down.

That's fine, but for most folks on here who don't run as high powered of a list on here - and that's the vast majority - I wanted to outline why I think Wasteland is probably actively harmful to their environments.

Even in your cube, Wasteland often seems like taking a jackhammer to a nail. When you and safra streamed a cube matchup a couple of weeks back - you were on Boros aggro, and she was Esper aggro - and she Wastelanded your first Plateau (and second land overall, I think) to keep you off red and strand four cards in your hand, that wasn't Good Magic to me. What could've been an interesting, back & forth game turned into a lopsided affair that involved next to no decisions on your end.

 

[RavebornMuse]

Shouldn't you be running five mana wraths in your environment instead of letting Aggro players bring a gun to a knife fight?

Five-mana wraths are totally playable and I find them super great if you lower the density of 4-cmc wraths. Players hardly notice the difference but it is so helpful for aggressive decks in need of a little more room to breathe. It's also really helped to make control players take matches a bit more seriously, because waiting for t5 puts much greater demands on early game interaction than t4. (I'm nearly at the point of cutting my final 4cmc wrath in white - only thing holding me back is my fondness for white-border white cards)

 

[Onderzeeboot]

Five-mana wraths are totally playable and I find them super great if you lower the density of 4-cmc wraths. Players hardly notice the difference but it is so helpful for aggressive decks in need of a little more room to breathe. It's also really helped to make control players take matches a bit more seriously, because waiting for t5 puts much greater demands on early game interaction than t4. (I'm nearly at the point of cutting my final 4cmc wrath in white - only thing holding me back is my fondness for white-border white cards)

To be honest I still run a few 4 cmc wraths, but almost no mana rocks.

 

[Jason Waddell]

Shouldn't you be running five mana wraths in your environment instead of letting Aggro players bring a gun to a knife fight?

Ideally the thought was to give both players guns. Rebalancing would require a lot more than lowering the power level of the wrath effects. Maybe that's laziness or stubbornness on my part speaking, but I'll keep an eye on it.

Surely anecdotes aren't great, but one of my most fun cube games involved clawing back from being double wastelanded on turns one and two. I do realize that could have turned out very differently though.

 

[Dom Harvey]

I'm at the point now where the card Wrath of God isn't that good against the aggro decks in my Cube. Between recursive creatures, flash/instants, 'when this dies' triggers, creature lands, bestow, and so on, it's pretty easy to power through a Wrath. If anything, I'd like more focused anti-aggro cards to give my control decks a fighting chance.

 

[Jason Waddell]

I'm at the point now where the card Wrath of God isn't that good against the aggro decks in my Cube. Between recursive creatures, flash/instants, 'when this dies' triggers, creature lands, bestow, and so on, it's pretty easy to power through a Wrath. If anything, I'd like more focused anti-aggro cards to give my control decks a fighting chance.

This is what I run Condemn and Oust and Innocent Blood for.

 

[Eric Chan]

I'm with Dom in that the effects of Wraths are a bit overstated - as an aggro player, what's hardest to come back from is Lightning Helix into Electrolyze into planeswalker. I'm already playing around all of the Wraths, as that's integral to my game plan; but if cheap interaction is the name of the game, then it's much harder to mount a comeback.

So I don't really buy the narrative of "watch the fourth land, he'll sweep the board" being the turning point in aggro vs. control; nor of the need to nuke the living daylights out of a control deck's manabase to prevent them from getting there.

 

[Dom Harvey]

on that note, what are some good mid-late game control finishers that can close things out against aggro without getting into Grave Titan/big Elspeth territory?

 

[Onderzeeboot]

on that note, what are some good mid-late game control finishers that can close things out against aggro without getting into Grave Titan/big Elspeth territory?

 

[Jason Waddell]

I'm with Dom in that the effects of Wraths are a bit overstated - as an aggro player, what's hardest to come back from is Lightning Helix into Electrolyze into planeswalker. I'm already playing around all of the Wraths, as that's integral to my game plan; but if cheap interaction is the name of the game, then it's much harder to mount a comeback.

So I don't really buy the narrative of "watch the fourth land, he'll sweep the board" being the turning point in aggro vs. control; nor of the need to nuke the living daylights out of a control deck's manabase to prevent them from getting there.

I feel like some of the rhetoric going around is pretty strong. I probably run fewer land destruction elements than I used to, back in the day when I ran Molten Rain and Stone Rain and Ice Storm and Plow Under and Fulminator Mage and that whole suite of effects. The density of land destruction is pretty low in my current environment. I'll keep a watchful eye on things, but plenty of effects cause land / color screw, and having a peppering of cards spread across multiple players doesn't feel like "nuking the living daylights" out of a manabase.

 

[Eric Chan]

I obviously have less experience with your cube than you do, but from the recent streams I've witnessed, as well as some old online drafts of yours I participated in, I view Wasteland as a net negative overall for your environment. There was never an instance of Hero valiantly picking off the fourth land of Villain right before the latter could blow up the world; it's only ever been "hah! you're mana screwed already, now let me bring you back into the Stone Age".

There are plenty of things to learn from Legacy, but I remain unconvinced that turn two land destruction on the play is one of them. The Bad Guys in your format aren't trying to Show and Tell out a Griselbrand or Omniscience. They're just trying to put in a honest day's work and cast a Wrath of God on time; or in the instance I witnessed, you were trying to drop a couple of red aggro animals on-curve. Is preventing the occasional greedy splash worth all of the extra collateral damage that Wastelands add?

 

[Grillo_Parlante]

Yeah, the elephant in the room is what does turn 0 land destruction add to the environment.

 

[Diakonov]

Tec Edge is more directly appropriate for keeping players from being too greedy, but as people have said, punishing greedy mana bases and offing the occasional utility land isn't usually a good enough reason for most people to bother running it.

In my experience, it's rare for a single Wasteland to stop a 2-color w/ splash deck dead in its tracks. However, the tempo (excuse my language) that Wasteland brings to aggro is being understated. It's not about keeping the opponent off colors or holding off the wrath turn as much as it is about simply prolonging the early game. The aggro deck has another whole turn to play a threat and get in another attack before the slower decks can ramp up to their stronger spells in general; not just wraths.

 

[Jason Waddell]

In my experience, it's rare for a single Wasteland to stop a 2-color w/ splash deck dead in its tracks. However, the tempo (excuse my language) that Wasteland brings to aggro is being understated. It's not about keeping the opponent off colors or holding off the wrath turn as much as it is about simply prolonging the early game. The aggro deck has another whole turn to play a threat and get in another attack before the slower decks can ramp up to their stronger spells in general; not just wraths.

Yeah, kind of this. It doesn't have to be a wrath, but aggro wants to prolong the "early" game as long as possible. Not sure what the answer is.