Taking consistency definitions from my “How many colored sources do you need to consistency cast your spells?” article, you might fall from 89 to 83 percent consistency if you had to run basic lands instead of Needleverge Pathway. But without Needleverge Pathway to fix Hopeful Initiate and Kumano Faces Kakkazan on turn one, it simply wouldn’t work. It’s a popular and powerful archetype right now. Take pre-rotation Boros Aggro, for example. Untapped duals are particularly invaluable for aggro decks with one-drops in multiple colors or with double-pip spells. These decks generally want to curve out as early as turn one, and they don’t care about their own life total. Yet how much better a pain land is than a basic land depends on your turn-one color requirements and on how highly you value your life total.īut for aggro decks, it’s a game-changer. But it’s better to have a bad Pathway than no Pathway at all. Painlands will largely be worse than Pathways, barring exceptions like Jerren, Corrupted Bishop, a reprint of Thought-Knot Seer or curving Spell Pierce into Bloodtithe Harvester. Mana bases in post-rotation Standard will look different because with the release of Dominaria United, Pathways, creature-lands and modal double-faced cards will rotate out. What Do the Painlands Mean for Post-Rotation Standard? That set, which will be released on Novem, is also set on the plane of Dominaria, which means that it can also feature painlands with Dominaria-specific location names. In Dominaria United, we’re only getting six of the 10 pain lands, but the other four will be in The Brothers’ War. Getting an understandably large number of questions about "where are the other 4 painlands going to be?" Rest assured, they're coming soon. It’s better to lose a life and cast your spells than to risk not being able to cast your spells at all. Since then, the cycle of 10 pain lands has been reprinted numerous times, and they’ve always seen a good amount of play. Several years later, with the release of Apocalypse in 2001, the five enemy-color painlands were introduced. At first, we only had the allied-color ones. It wasn’t until 2000 that the early Magic designers got “tap lands” right: In Invasion, they introduced Coastal Tower, Salt Marsh, Urborg Volcano, Shivan Oasis and Elfhame Palace.īut back to the painlands. This made for more interesting deck building challenges.įor completeness, I should mention that Ice Age also introduced a cycle of depletion lands: Land Cap, Lava Tubes, River Delta, Timberline Ridge and Veldt. The painlands enabled players to build multicolor decks but, unlike the Alpha ones, they weren’t strictly better than basic lands ( Wasteland was not introduced before 1997). Introduced in Ice Age in 1995, they offered an elegant, clean drawback. Indeed, the very first set of conditional dual lands in the history of the game – discounting the overpowered unconditional ones from Alpha, such as Plateau and Underground Sea – were the allied-color pain lands: Adarkar Wastes, Brushland, Karplusan Forest, Sulfurous Springs and Underground River. Yet in Dominaria United, we’re going back to the originals ! Battle lands, bounce lands, check lands, cycling lands, fast lands, filter lands, creature lands, scry lands, slow lands, shock lands, show lands, tribal lands, the list goes on. Throughout nearly 30 years of history, we’ve gone through countless cycles of conditional dual lands. Before putting this into perspective, let me go over a bit of history. Hence, when analyzing a Constructed format, we should start by examining the possibilities defined by its non-basic lands, particularly the ones that tap for multiple colors of mana. The mana base is the foundation of every Magic deck. For aggro players in post-rotation Standard, the reprinting of six painlands in Dominaria United is a big deal.
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