Storage Lands
I am very fond of storage lands and I love the concept however they are all pretty unplayable. There have been multicoloured, monocoloured and colourless iterations and none are good. They are slowly getting better but not fast enough it would seem! At least the newer ones tap for some mana conventionally. The first two printings were the mono coloured versions in Fallen Empires and then Mercadian Masques. They are functionally very similar with some mild convenience added to the latter but without any of the much needed power. I am not really sure these lands even qualify for this list as they don't really tap for mana in the conventional sense. The mana output unaided is less than a mana per turn which is highly unimpressive. It takes a long time to build up to any burst output as well. The only way these could ever be playable is in some extreme proliferate style of combo and even that is pushing it. Calling them unplayable is unfair as they are so lovely looking and feeling that I can see myself running them just for the joy of doing so. Magic is about fun more than it is about being optimal and these lands showcase that well.
Fallen Empires Cycle 0/10
Mercadian Masques Cycle 0/10
Cabal Coffers 6/10
Given that I included the storage lands I guess I have to also include these (Coffers and Stronghold) being that they only produce mana and only produce mana of one colour. Cabal Coffers is incredibly potent but also very slow. You need to be mono black or as good as and play basically just swamps while also consistently surviving to at least turn five. Technically Coffers can be better than a Swamp by turn four if used with it's partner in crime Tomb of Yawgmoth. Coffers is still a very narrow land indeed and not a well suited card for cube drafting or the quicker paced formats.
Cabal Stronghold 2/10
This has all the same issues as Coffers while being significantly lower in power. They go in the same decks as each other but reduce the potency of the other. You need a couple more turns with Stronghold before it is able to produce more than one mana. The only thing really going for Stronghold is that it taps for colourless and thus is a little less awkward in the early game. The thing is, you should have plenty of Swamps to lay early if you are the kind of deck relying to take advantage of these kind of card. Mostly I think I would just rather a Temple of the False God to Stronghold. If it is only just playable in the deck built to take advantage of lots of swamps it certainly shouldn't be in draft cubes.
The Castle cycle from Throne of Eldraine is one of the best all round cycles of utility lands we have ever seen and by a reasonable margin too. This is almost entirely down to their negligible drawback. In a format like cube where all the best mana fixing has the basic land types you can expect your Castles to come down untapped most of the time which in turn makes them close to free inclusions. The problem with this is that it means the abilities have to be a little tamer so as to stop the cards being broken. As such they are all fairly low impact. I have played with them all a lot and rarely has including them cause any issue however I have activated them infrequently and rarely in a way that changes the outcome of the game. These are a fine example of cards that are incredibly playable but fail to be sufficiently meaningful. I would play these lands in most decks if it didn't cost me a pick..
Castle Ardenvale 4/10
A 1/1 at five mana once per turn wins the game so slowly. It is laughable tempo and threat adding near nothing to an aggressive plan and taking far too long in a control one. Now and again you scale it with some lords or get a "free" activation because they played around your Command or Confluence and that free token then saves the life of a planeswalker with a chump block and the card is relevant but mostly by the time you are activating it you are losing. A stable control deck trying to win through using it is just waiting to lose to some problem top deck.
Castle Embereth 6/10
This felt like one of the most meaningful with good scaling and a very on brand ability to increase damage output. While more relevant more quickly than Ardenvale it had much the same problem of the game basically being over by the time activations were a good line. Spending mana on almost anything else is more effective most of the time. The best thing I have seen it do is help cast a twomana card with a Dreadhorde Arcanist.
Castle Garenbrig 6/10
Green gets a personal coloured Temple of the False God with the ability to produce mana early too. The restriction to creatures is not the problem, it is the fact that you play so few big dorks in your green decks. I rarely find I have more than two green dorks costing six or more mana. It fails to help cast non-green dorks making it quite the mono card too. Sometimes you cast a pair of dorks totalling six mana a turn quicker with this. It is one of the most meaningful of the cycle when activated but that happened far too infrequently for my liking. The use it gets makes it really hard to justify over several of the lands that can add two mana. Temple is playable in all the colours which is a great start.
Castle Lochthwain 7.5/10
Cheap card draw on a land is great but it is also quite desperate. When using this you are usually losing. It has retained its cube slot thus far where the others have fallen but I think that is a bias. It seems too good to cut but the results speak otherwise. It gets a lot of play and even gets activated more than the other Castles but I just never see it positively effecting a game. These kinds of lands are sufficiently inefficient that they are only making a difference when both players run dry on action at the same time and that happens infrequently.
Castle Vantress 7/10
I have found this to be the best of the cycle for performance acting a bit like a Search for Azcanta. It actually wins the game for you when late and stable with a control deck as it finds a proper threat you can seal the deal with rather than wasting time slowly popping out 1/1 dorks. It is a great control tool but it still isn't worth a slot. You activate it so infrequently thanks to the trend of the mana investment to effect ratio being so poor. Here you are paying five mana for something worth more like 1. I much prefer playing Search for Azcanta to this. They perform quite similar roles but Search has vastly more punch. The only reason this is as good as it is can be attributed to the representing of brutal countermagic like Cryptic Command and Mystic Confluence that people don't want to walk into. That can provide windows where control players have spare mana to use on other instant speed things.
Karoo Lands 1/10
The original bounce lands have been almost entirely superseded by the Ravnica cycle. The only reason to be playing the originals is in commander where colour identity matters. Fundamentally these are all lands that tap for two mana but return a land to hand so while not ramping you they do effectively add an extra land card into hand. They also have all the good synergies of lands that tap two mana. Sadly these lands require a specific basic type to bounce and need it to be untapped. This makes them narrower and rather less powerful effectively costing you two mana to deploy rather than one. They also fail to fix. You can get four of your colour bounce lands from Ravnica if you are into that sort of thing so you should never need that 5th Karoo land. More than a couple of bounce lands in a 40 card list gets really iffy. Karoo lands have seen play over the years but they are a liability and need playing with caution. Much as with bounce lands, you want to be pretty sure that there isn't much spot land removal floating around!
Dakmor Salvage 3/10
With a low dredge value this isn't a great self mill tool itself however it is a cute supplement to a self mill deck as a means to increase your consistency on making land drops. Typically such decks are trying to go fast and so a tapped land is rather less value. When you often just risk it and try and draw an untapped land it isn't a great sign for Salvage. Security and mild utility at the cost of power.
Keldon Megaliths 4/10
This is decent enough but has the same issue as salvage. Decks that are likely to want a ping on a land and be hellbent are the ones that don't want EtB tapped lands. The effect is pretty minor by the time you will sensibly have it online by which point all you are really getting from it is some reach which can be found on other more powerful and efficient cards. If you could more usefully use this as removal in the midgame it would see more action.
Llanowar Reborn 5.5/10
This is a surprisingly powerful land thanks to the many synergies it has. Just sticking a bonus counter on a Walking Ballista is pretty massive. Things can start to get really out of hand when there are things like Hardened Scales floating about. The graft almost recovers the tempo cost of the EtB tapped land but affords the potential to scale it with things to significantly increase the power and tempo, or to just eek out some advantage thanks to the option richness of the card. Too narrow in that you really want some synergy to hit the requisite impact levels.
New Benalia 1/10
Like the Karoo lands this is now just outclassed by the dual Scry lands and only really has any place in colour identity restricted formats. Scry on land is great but there are just enough better lands. It is also a thing for slower builds reducing the value. Why play a card like this that only really a control deck might want when there is Castle Ardenvale that both a control and an aggro deck can make use of.
Tolaria West 6/10
A land that tutors. Uncounterable one for one tutoring at that. Yes, it can only find a no mana cost card, yes it is sorcery speed and yes, the land enters tapped but still, a land that tutors. This is found in loads and loads of combo decks and is used to tutor a big old bunch of things. It is a bit slow and clunky but it is all sorts of consistency in the appropriate lists. I run a copy in my combo cube and it gets a lot of love there but it is rather too niche for more conventional cubes.
No comments:
Post a Comment