(orig. published Aug. 07, 2024)
A few months ago, I did a Deep-Dive on this set’s tri-lands, and the inspirations behind their design. Since then, they’ve proven to be extremely successful… so much so that I decided to make more!
First, the good: after several rounds of playtesting, these lands have done exactly what I hoped they would. They feel fun, fair, and reliable! Their inclusion as commons means the official set cube has four copies of each, so players can expect to find several in a given draft.
They allow players to mana-fix into any 2-color combination, and even support some very solid 3-color decks (Black/Red/Green has been THE deck to beat so far), without letting games devolve into 5-color soup. As important as it is for lands to provide multiple colors for decks to function, it’s crucial to maintain the restrictions of each color identity that are baked into the DNA of Magic.
So what’s the problem? This original 5-card cycle was designed to ensure each color pair was represented, in much the way MtG has released triomes in their actual sets. However, This inherently means half of the pairs show up twice as often as others! This became a clear factor in pushing players toward certain colors and away from others when deckbuilding, more than I had expected.
It didn’t help that one of these pairs, Red/Green, has been dominant so far, with a straightforward gameplan, tons of support, and some of the best top-end bombs the set has to offer (More on that in a future post). With both Bran Bramble and Cobbleston fueling these decks, it was was simply too good to pass up, while other archetypes like Blue/Red Wizards struggled to come together with only Glimmer to back them up.
With all that in mind, I set to work on an additional 5 lands to fully complete this cycle! With all 10 in the set, the math becomes much more stable – each 3-color combination now has a dedicated land, and each color pair exists on 3 lands. My hope is that it will now feel more consistent for a player to build into any color combos they want.
This also introduces a new problem however… If these all remain Common, there are now DOUBLE the total tri-lands in the set cube. I don’t have the wiggle room I’d need to shift all of them to Uncommons, but I liked the frequency of their appearance before. As a compromise, I’ve decided to keep them in the Common slot, but only include two copies of each. So players should expect to see them just as often as before, but now with a more even color distribution.
In all, I’m very excited about how these turned out! I haven’t even touched on the art/theming, but it was a fun challenge to find 5 more fitting locations from our D&D campaign and illustrate them. I think they’re visually some of my favorites in the whole set so far! Once it’s time to print physical copies, there’s a good chance our Commander pod will house-rule these to be legal outside of this homebrew set.
