General When Is Fixing Too Good?

[FlowerSunRain]

Its not really an argument, just an observation. Just because Wasteland has an opportunity cost doesn't mean that it isn't worth every penny. My cube has lots of really strong decks that use a very low curve, so even though those decks have to "pay" to include wasteland, it was a way more powerful tool then those decks needed in spite of the cost.

After listening to Jason's video, I wonder if giving Wasteland a "Serra Avenger" type clause might make more sense. "You cannot activate this ability until after any player's fourth untap phase." This wording is a little awkward, but it helps maintain the power level parity between using it on the play vs. draw.

 

[Jeff H]

Non-colorscrew Wasteland:
Tap + sac to destroy target land that can produce 1 or fewer colors of mana

Kills colorless utility land and basics, aggro can extend the early game without hitting a splash dual?

 

[Jason Waddell]

Non-colorscrew Wasteland:
Tap + sac to destroy target land that can produce 1 or fewer colors of mana

Kills colorless utility land and basics, aggro can extend the early game without hitting a splash dual?

Protect yourself by playing.... non-basics? That's an interesting take.

 

[Eric Chan]

I understand the arguments about the supposed rarity of actual mana screw or colour screw occurring, I really do. But, to me, those arguments sound suspiciously like the same ones trotted out by the folks who run the full gamut of power in their cubes, and wave away the non-games produced by their own environments as simply occasional happenstances. "Oh, yeah, he drew the Black Lotus and the Yawgmoth's Will this game. But that hasn't happened here for a while". It may just be that I take my job as a cube designer very seriously, but even one non-game caused by the cards I've carefully curated myself - as opposed to non-games caused by normal, random Magic variance - is a difficult pill to swallow. That's blood on my hands. It's why I'm generally quick to toss cards out of my list as soon as there's evidence that they swing games hard in one direction while simultaneously being difficult to answer, whether they're enchantments, planeswalkers, artifacts, or even non-basic lands.

I think this really may be where our differences in opinion come down to, then. Wasteland is like Power - for Riptiders. Yep, there's going to be the odd non-game here or there, but at least it'll be fun for one person. (Or... will it?)

Regarding the opportunity cost of other colourless lands like Mishra's Factory and Volrath's Stronghold, none of these cards have the capability to stop someone from Playing Magic on turns one or two. Perhaps Stone Rain does, in exceptional circumstances, but the opportunity cost there is an actual spell. When a card can shut down a game before a player's had a chance to run out more than one spell - even if that doesn't happen a whole lot! - it should, at the very least, carry some non-trivial opportunity cost.

 

[Grillo_Parlante]

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.

There is one other point that I feel should be included:

5. Wasteland's mana cost is itself. Stonerain requires an investment of 3 mana.

We've been couching the discussion predominately in terms of turn 1 LD, but one of wastelands strengths is that you can sequence out multiple spells in a turn, past turn 1.

On turn 3, stone rain requires an investment of my entire turn, while wasteland lets me blow up a non-basic, and still play out 1-2 other spells.

I know thats a less dramatic scenario than turn 1 wasteland induced mana screw, but its probably a generally more accurate description of the turns in which its going to be activated.

 

[Jason Waddell]

On turn 3, stone rain requires an investment of my entire turn, while wasteland lets me blow up a non-basic, and still play out 1-2 other spells.

I agree. A lot of times a player can play around Wasteland for a turn or two, but will have to give it food eventually.

For my environment, I like that Wasteland can be used for sequencing instead of just taking the whole turn, but I know others may disagree.

 

[Grillo_Parlante]

If we are going to talk about wasteland as power, I think we have to put post turn 1-2 plays under the microscope. Actual power can lead to unfun non-games at any point that its drawn; is wasteland similar though?

 

[Eric Chan]

That might just be me using that pesky 'rhetoric' again. (He's my new best friend, by the way, my ol' pal Rhetoric.) For the record, I think the answer to your question is, in all likelihood, no - because we've seen that Tectonic Edge doesn't carry nearly the same destructive element to gameplay when it's typically used on turn four.

With my (hyperbolic?) analogy, I didn't mean to say that Wasteland has game-ruining potential in every game in which it's drawn. Only that, like with power, there will be some non-zero number of one-sided games, where the opponent didn't get any opportunity to play a fair game of Magic.

 

[Diakonov]

To add to the sequencing of Wasteland discussion: it's often not strategically appropriate to use Wasteland to destroy your opponent's first land. You want to use it when you can continue to play threats while your opponent can't play spells as effectively. If you're playing aggro and only have a single 1-drop and some number of 2-drops, it's probably better to purposely wait until turn 3 (depending on your knowledge of the opponent's potential early game). Figuring this out is part of what's interesting about playing Wasteland.

Edit: just looked back and realized that I basically reiterated what Grillo said. So...yeah, what he said!

 

[Dom Harvey]

If we are going to talk about wasteland as power, I think we have to put post turn 1-2 plays under the microscope. Actual power can lead to unfun non-games at any point that its drawn; is wasteland similar though?

It can, but Mox Jet isn't doing much on turn 8 and sometimes Time Walk is just Explore. The normal outcome with Wasteland is not appealing to me.

 

[Diakonov]

Anyway, I'm interested in adding another cycle of fixing. For my 450 cube I currently run 2x fetches, 2x shocks, 1x duals. Which cycle should be added next? My gut tells me the one that is most aggro-friendly. I haven't crossed into custom-card territory yet, so a full cycle of fast-lands is out. Maybe painlands?

 

[Aoret]

If anyone has any thoughts on the Wasteland variants I discussed, would be interested in hashing it out.

I like the tec edge variant more. My gripes with the shroudlike variant are 1. the same gripe you have about rules memory and 2. I dislike giving players the ability to have wasteland-proof manlands (though I do acknowledge that it adds some complexity/play to the format). One thing I like about the tec edge method that you've hinted at but not explicitly stated is that it's very adjustable. We can change what the numbers are in terms of lands in play to activate it, whether it has a mana cost, etc. (though some of these incur the same problems as gripe #1 with the shroudlike method).

Notes on the vid itself: a bit long on the examples. I watched through 4 or 5 then skipped to your conclusions. I think if this were meant to be an external product, you'd have to do just a little bit more work setting up context than you do. Basically summarize the arguments on each side I guess. I viewed the vid more as an experiment in doing videos while also creating an internal product, so this criticism probably doesn't apply.

Lastly, another interesting observation about my own format based on the discussion of opportunity cost for wasteland. I view the opportunity cost as incredibly high because I'm typically trying to run a maxed out number of utility/wasteland slots while splitting the rest of my manabase 50/50 between fetches and fetchables. Obviously I need a minimum of color-producing sources, and I want a minimum of one basic land per color, but I've found that I usually have to give up on at least one of these goals. I'm still not actually sure what an ideal manabase for a given deck even looks like in my cube. All this is to say that I think the card has a similarly high opportunity cost in my cube as LD spells do in other people's. Not an argument in favor of you guys running more of them (because I'm no longer convinced it is a good idea outside of my own format), but a really interesting thing that I learned about why my own format works

 

[Chris Taylor]

Not to pick on you, Chris, but anecdotal evidence like that from yourself and others doesn't mean much without additional context about the skill level of your playgroup (at least, not to me). If I were playing in your cube, for example, you can be sure I'd be using Wastelands almost exclusively to cut people off their splash colours. That's what it does best, after all, over something like Tectonic Edge.

To rephrase my statement, this discussion about Wasteland is more about what we as cube designers are enabling our playgroup to do, via the cards that we've curated in our list. Whether or not our drafters are actually capable of pulling off said tactics is a function of many other variables - how Spikey they are, whether they see the interactions at all, how mana colours people are playing on average, and all that. So, to me, "I put it there, but no Bad Stuff has happened yet" doesn't mean we can necessarily wash our hands of the problem.

I feel like waiting until your opponent has their splash color in play top set both of you back a land is a missed opportunity. Sure sometimes you'll hit volcanic island on T3 from your noticably blue-white opponent because it's what they happened to have in their hand, but that's hardly the average case.

Are your drafters going and getting thier splash land with the first fetch? That seems like loose play, especially of the splash card isn't being cast then.

 

[Eric Chan]

To be clear, I'm not so much interested in the average case scenarios of Wasteland as I am the worst case scenarios. Will Wasteland produce interesting sequencing decisions for both the Hero and Villain some amount of the time? Sure, I have no doubt that it provides good play and counterplay when everything is going according to plan. It's the non-games that Wasteland has the potential of producing that I'd rather focus on. At the risk of incurring the wrath of half the forum, I'll say that I believe some amount of bias exists from players who are coming from Legacy backgrounds in their unusual attachment towards a card that can very obviously ruin games of Magic before they even start, because it's dificult to understand why else the card is so beloved when the worst case scenarios are very much Net Negative Fun for one player.

Certainly, there will be games where you choose to use it turn three or four, both players cast a few spells before the disruptive element occurred, and everyone can agree that it was a Real Game of Magic. You'll see no argument from me. What I do take issue with is when one player, through no fault of their own, nor through the random machinations of the Shuffler, doesn't get to play Magic because of circumstances entirely out of their control. Perhaps this may happen only one in ten games where Wasteland is played - and I suspect that's a conservative estimate - but even that is too much. Remember that even powered cubes can and will produce some number of real, back and forth affairs, but they will occasionally give you games of solitaire that one player didn't realize he wasn't allowed to play in. How often that happens will vary from cube to cube, but I don't think I'm being too hyperbolic in drawing that analogy.

Chris: your math seems... "fuzzy", at best. You run 20 fetches in 450 cards, as far as I can tell, so the average drafter will have 2, perhaps 3 fetchlands if they've drafted well. With those numbers, you're more likely than not to have access to zero fetchlands by turn three. Why are we talking about the "first fetch", if your drafters may only draw one fetch per game, if even that?

 

[Eric Chan]

Here's another analogy. I got it from my buddy Rhetoric, though, and he's a little... over the top, so you'll have to forgive him if he steps out of bounds. He assured me this was worth passing onto you guys, though.

Let's take Vendilion Clique. It's a card beloved by almost everyone on the forum, present company included, and proclaimed by Jason to be the best designed card in all of Magic. Imagine it had another rider:

When Vendilion Clique enters the battlefield, roll two six-sided die. If the total of the die is 36, your opponents lose the game. If the total of the die is 2, you lose the game.

Would you still run this card?

95% of the time, you still get the awesome play and counterplay that we all know and love, that we can carefully sequence for and maximize our value upon. 5% of the time, nothing matters and the world explodes.

Does the overall thrust of the card still make it worthwhile enough to be a cube inclusion, despite the non-games that it can and will produce, through no factors anyone can control, other than random happenstance?

 

[shamizy]

I personally love Wasteland after adding three to my cube a couple of months back. It's a great card for punishing greedy manabases, leads to interesting decisions, and brings a great disruptive element to the game. I played for a long time without Wastelands in my cube, but quickly realized that that was a mistake because there was no punishment for going goodstuff any time you could. Pick a couple of fetches, a few duals and just play whatever you want; you likely can get away with it. Like, whenever I drafted my own cube, I'd see that I'd drift towards just drafting sweet cards and making the mana work with greedy splashes like Grixis with 1BB into 1UUU into 3RR or something. Without a check in place, there's nothing really stopping my drafters from just going goodstuff if it's available to them. I want an environment that will reward synergies and good drafting tendencies, not one where you can just go goodstuff each time and just crush people. Wasteland has been a good addition to circumvent that mindset; keeps people honest if they've seen one or two being passed around b/c it's likely that some aggro deck will be packing them.

On sequencing it's not a typical T1 play, sometimes a T2 play if you can get the correct read off an opponent, but mostly a T3+ play. I like having some options to attack greedy mana; Tec Edge just never cut it out of the ULD because T3-T4 is usually the critical point in my cube where action starts happening. Non-games can happen, but that's not as big a problem to me if it happens every once in a while. Sometimes my drafters just want one game out of a night of cubing where they just nut-drawed their opponent and crushed them. I'm fine with that happening every now and then, but not the majority of the time. This is mostly avoided by there being a mere 3/420; many times we'll have one of them just sitting off in the unused pile of cards. It teaches a good lesson to players and it's usually led to better sequencing in future games as a result. And it's not like you'll run into 3 opponents on cube night who'll wreck your mana each round.

As far as the non-game spectrum is concerned, we also need to consider the types of decks interested in Wasteland. It's more often than not a card for aggro in our cubes, a means of pressuring the opponent by denying them their threats and answers on curve to deal with yours. These decks are usually 2 colors, sometimes just a splash of the 2nd if it's Rx aggro. Keeping them off 4 mana to stick a fatty to Abyss your board or a wrath to clear it is huge (which is why I also love taxing effects like Thalia and her horse).

And I mean it's not like there isn't a cost to running Wastelands in a given deck. It makes it quite difficult to hit 1XX or 1YY costs in two color decks on curve sometimes. There aren't many 3+ color decks that will entertain running a Wasteland in my environment because the land slot is too valuable for fixing or for some sweet ULD tech. I don't want goodstuff to just run rampant or aggro to be outclassed T4+ based off a natural curve. I'm totally cool with giving the Wx or Rx Aggro decks the ability to pressure greedier decks by attacking their curve; they've made concessions in their mana base to allow for this disruptive element. There are many times that these decks have non-games after a certain point because their threats just get completely outclassed. Cheap removal and disruptive cards give aggro the teeth it needs to deal with fatties and wraths once it can't just stick 2/1s to get there and Wasteland has contributed big time in the drafts that I've seen it in.

TLDR; I'm Team Wasteland and all for anything that keeps people from just going goodstuff whenever they have the chance.

 

[Eric Chan]

Without delving too deeply into the tangle of subjects brought up, I will say that I believe that the good stuff vs synergy problem is one that exists on an entirely different axis than the the wild, greedy manabase vs tight two-colour deck issue. There are good stuff decks that only need two colours to do their thing, and Kitchen Finks into Flametongue Kavu into Huntmaster of the Fells into Inferno Titan is as goodstuff a pile as any. Then there are awesome synergy decks that start in two colours, and branch into two more - the Gravecrawler/Goblin Bombardment deck that saw fit to splash all of Lingering Souls, Rancor, and Bloodbraid Elf, let's say.

Wastelands can certainly help you to get your players to trim down on excessive splashes and stick to a more disciplined colour palette. But, at the risk of making assumptions about your format, I would venture a guess and say that there may be other issues at hand if Generic Good Stuff decks are consistently getting the upper hand on synergy decks.

 

[shamizy]

It's not consistently getting the upper hand, but a goodstuff deck will run over a synergy deck if it's engine isn't assembled in time. That's true in most formats though, not really a cube only issue. It's hard to keep my drafters disciplined into sticking with a given archetype/strategy unless there are definite payoffs with mana as good as it is. Goodstuff is probably a bad term to use here, I'm more against greedy mana-bases than anything, something that's just splashing for every good card they come across.

Another key is shifting more towards 1XX costing cards rather something that would be 2X, but the issue is that there are just so many sweet cards that I want to run that require very little color commitment.

 

[Diakonov]

Here's another analogy. I got it from my buddy Rhetoric, though, and he's a little... over the top, so you'll have to forgive him if he steps out of bounds. He assured me this was worth passing onto you guys, though.

Let's take Vendilion Clique. It's a card beloved by almost everyone on the forum, present company included, and proclaimed by Jason to be the best designed card in all of Magic. Imagine it had another rider:

When Vendilion Clique enters the battlefield, roll two six-sided die. If the total of the die is 36, your opponents lose the game. If the total of the die is 2, you lose the game.

Would you still run this card?

95% of the time, you still get the awesome play and counterplay that we all know and love, that we can carefully sequence for and maximize our value upon. 5% of the time, nothing matters and the world explodes.

Does the overall thrust of the card still make it worthwhile enough to be a cube inclusion, despite the non-games that it can and will produce, through no factors anyone can control, other than random happenstance?

I'd still run it. I think this might be a good illustration of how our philosophies differ slightly. I really don't think anyone is right or wrong, in this case.

Consider this: for two years I had to fight through Stax decks that could literally prevent you from playing magic cards. Turn 1 Mishra's Workshop --> Trinisphere, turn 2 Crucible of Worlds + Strip Mine. Now that's not everybody's cup of tea, and of course it's an extreme example, but believe it or not there was a lot of contention at the time when DCI restricted Trinisphere (first ever card banned/restricted because "unfun," not for competitive reasons) because 4-Trinisphere's existence actually created a very interesting format. It was critical that you sequenced exactly right against those kind of decks, and working your way up to Rebuild --> Holy Crap Get Permanents On the Board While You Can was truly satisfying.

So I guess I'm willing to tolerate the occasional GRBS if something interesting would usually come from it. Different strokes.

 

[FlowerSunRain]

I just took out the vast majority of my good stuff. That solved the whole good stuff issue nicely.

 

[Chris Taylor]

To be clear, I'm not so much interested in the average case scenarios of Wasteland as I am the worst case scenarios. Will Wasteland produce interesting sequencing decisions for both the Hero and Villain some amount of the time? Sure, I have no doubt that it provides good play and counterplay when everything is going according to plan. It's the non-games that Wasteland has the potential of producing that I'd rather focus on. At the risk of incurring the wrath of half the forum, I'll say that I believe some amount of bias exists from players who are coming from Legacy backgrounds in their unusual attachment towards a card that can very obviously ruin games of Magic before they even start, because it's dificult to understand why else the card is so beloved when the worst case scenarios are very much Net Negative Fun for one player.

Certainly, there will be games where you choose to use it turn three or four, both players cast a few spells before the disruptive element occurred, and everyone can agree that it was a Real Game of Magic. You'll see no argument from me. What I do take issue with is when one player, through no fault of their own, nor through the random machinations of the Shuffler, doesn't get to play Magic because of circumstances entirely out of their control. Perhaps this may happen only one in ten games where Wasteland is played - and I suspect that's a conservative estimate - but even that is too much. Remember that even powered cubes can and will produce some number of real, back and forth affairs, but they will occasionally give you games of solitaire that one player didn't realize he wasn't allowed to play in. How often that happens will vary from cube to cube, but I don't think I'm being too hyperbolic in drawing that analogy.

Chris: your math seems... "fuzzy", at best. You run 20 fetches in 450 cards, as far as I can tell, so the average drafter will have 2, perhaps 3 fetchlands if they've drafted well. With those numbers, you're more likely than not to have access to zero fetchlands by turn three. Why are we talking about the "first fetch", if your drafters may only draw one fetch per game, if even that?

I think the text in bold might fundamentally be the difference

Like, given your vendillion clique example (which does sound a bit extreme, I'll admit) I'd run that card, sharpie out the lose/win text, but I still don't feel wasteland is anywhere near that. We see lots of games where it gets used on turn 1 or 2 which are still very real games of magic.


RE: Math, it depends. Brainstorm/Sylvan Library etc incentivizes you to play the fetchlands later rather than earlier, and you don't always need your splash land. I do a lot of fetching for basics, as do my drafters I find (Sometimes if they're really hard coded on underground sea being strictly better swamp, but usually that's not the case. Shocklands also tend to get fetched later because people want to avoid the damage if they can).
There's also other ways your splash card can get played, mostly prismatic lens, but there's a custom darksteel ingot I run as well, and Farseek/Evolving Wilds variants letting you have a basic or two to help out. And this is all assuming you have your splash card, and need to cast it in short order, but can't right now!

The worst case of anything is going to be awful. The worst case of literally every game of magic is the same as the worst case of wasteland, and even tec edge! What I'm saying is
-There's ways to play around it
-Cutting a color doesn't matter most of the time, due to the number of stars that have to align for that to happen
-The added utility for you to make the decision for both players to be back a land is a big upside. Tectonic Edge barely ever provides that option when it would actually matter.

 

[Chingonman]

Please pardon my ignorance but how about just straight up dual lands for fixing? 3 copies of each dual and NO fetches for a 360 cube. Duals get wasted, they help aggro and they don't thin your deck. Moreover Duals are Powerful. They communicate to players their importance through their gravitas so they resonate on picks. It seems to me that they would be a very proactive fixing solution. Barring the obvious monetary constraints.

 

[Grillo_Parlante]

I'd still run it. I think this might be a good illustration of how our philosophies differ slightly. I really don't think anyone is right or wrong, in this case.

Consider this: for two years I had to fight through Stax decks that could literally prevent you from playing magic cards. Turn 1 Mishra's Workshop --> Trinisphere, turn 2 Crucible of Worlds + Strip Mine. Now that's not everybody's cup of tea, and of course it's an extreme example, but believe it or not there was a lot of contention at the time when DCI restricted Trinisphere (first ever card banned/restricted because "unfun," not for competitive reasons) because 4-Trinisphere's existence actually created a very interesting format. It was critical that you sequenced exactly right against those kind of decks, and working your way up to Rebuild --> Holy Crap Get Permanents On the Board While You Can was truly satisfying.

So I guess I'm willing to tolerate the occasional GRBS if something interesting would usually come from it. Different strokes.

Just based off of watching VSL, the shop matchups went from groan worthy boring to exciting since the restriction of chalice. I can't imagine them with x4 trinisphere as well.

 

[Eric Chan]

I just took at the vast majority of my good stuff. That solved the whole good stuff issue nicely.

This really is the way to go. To me, Wasteland comes at the problem like a bazooka, but sometimes what you want is the surgical scalpel.

 

[Chris Taylor]

Please pardon my ignorance but how about just straight up dual lands for fixing? 3 copies of each dual and NO fetches for a 360 cube. Duals get wasted, they help aggro and they don't thin your deck. Moreover Duals are Powerful. They communicate to players their importance through their gravitas so they resonate on picks. It seems to me that they would be a very proactive fixing solution. Barring the obvious monetary constraints.

Possibly, but this is still a huge reduction in overall fixing. 30/360 is 8% fixing, (40 duals is 11%ish, 50 is 13%, all of this suplamented by the ULD if it's there and fixing is in it)
I think the number of targets for wasteland in my cube (64/460 =~ 14%, + random one off lands like treetop village) is totally fine, I'm trying to prove they aren't the sole deciding factor in the games they're in