The reason we bring it up is because a lot of the arguments being used against Wasteland could be used here. "If Stone Rain mana screws a two color splash deck even once...". That would happen. Everyone ends up on a two-lander that includes a basic and a non-basic that taps for two other colors every now and then. Almost every land destruction spell will pass your automatic removal from cube test.
To be completely unambiguous, it's not the concept of land destruction itself that I'm against. It might surprise some of you to know that I cubed the actual card
Stone Rain at one point! (It wasn't very good). I've also been a
fairly vocal proponent in favour of a
land destruction theme for Gruul
on these very boards. To clear up any lingering confusion, the issues I have with
Wasteland that aren't present with Stone Rain and the like are as follows:
1) Wasteland doesn't require a colour commitment. Stone Rain at least forces you to have red mana.
2) Wasteland doesn't use a spell slot in your deck. I'm more than fine with people devoting one of their 23 spells to land destruction; it's a narrow enough usage that it'll be dead some amount of the time, so you really have to want to do this.
3) Wasteland makes mana. Stone Rain, not so much.
4) Wasteland is at its most powerful when employed on turns one and two. Stone Rain can be cast on turn two, but this is far less likely to happen.
The first three points cover the
opportunity cost of including Wasteland in your deck, versus a dedicated land destruction spell. There's almost no cost to doing so, assuming the rest of your manabase is well constructed, and even when there aren't juicy targets to blow up, Wasteland is still useful in helping you cast spells. If every Stone Rain was also a Stone Rain //
Wayfarer's Bauble split card, the Stone Rain portion was colourless, and cost
or
instead of
, you might hear me yelling about that card, too.
However, as printed, Stone Rain tends to be more of a sideboard card - not unlike
Negate - that is borderline maindeck-worthy, but will be useless in some number of matchups. There's a real, non-zero opportunity cost incurred when someone chooses to run Stone Rain - that's a slot that could've gone to, say,
Cunning Sparkmage, or
Pillar of Flame, or whatever your 23rd spell was going to be. I'm fine with giving people access to tools like land destruction, especially when they really want it, so long as they have to consciously make that choice for its inclusion. At the risk of invoking another blowback, I'm going to toss out the word 'free' here again - Wasteland's
opportunity cost is so low as to be nearly
free when it comes to deck construction.
Regarding the fourth point, nobody complains about
Tectonic Edge in cube because Villain was given a chance to play Magic for a couple of turns. There's a huge difference in the games where you can cast a few spells before your mana is stunted, and games in which your mana is disrupted immediately, your opponent continues to play board-affecting spells while you're forced to sit and watch, and then you don't resume playing Magic until turn five or six, when you draw a land that produces your splash colour. In the former situation, you can continue to make use of your permanents and try to maneuver yourself out of harm's way. In the latter, welp. You know that decision tree that you were analyzing? Yeah, someone took a big ol' chainsaw to that, so don't worry about it anymore. Solitaire's a great game.
