Design Deep-Dive #7: Lands Week – Utility Lands

(orig. published Jan. 19, 2024)

It’s important to remember that lands can provide interesting payoffs aside from color-fixing. This set will include four utility lands to reinforce specific sub-themes, such as sacrifice, Inspire/Bards, and spellslinging Wizards!

Crestfall Catacombs

The Unwell Kingdom features several sacrifice payoffs in black designed to play off different colors in unique ways – red likes attacking aggressively and reanimating, green creates armies of token fodder, and white looks to shave creatures off both sides of the board (blue has other plans). Crestfall Catacombs adds direct damage to each of these engines, giving them a way to go over the top and potentially sneak out a win!

Amphitheatre

(As a side note, here’s a peek at the prototype layout for these cards, before their effects are all nailed down and they get their own art. As a general game design rule, never let form get in the way of function during the early iteration phase!)

Bards play better to a crowd! Amphitheatre allows any deck to start pumping out Inspiration tokens, though it’s obviously better once you play a couple of Bard creatures, which are almost exclusively in red.

Tower of Secrets

As mentioned in the Tri-Lands breakdown, blue/red is one of the color pairs that’s less likely to be covered by a three-color land in this set. That may seem like bad news for the spellslinging Wizards theme, but they have to special lands that should more than make up for it!

Tower of Secrets is a wacky land… It doesn’t actually tap for mana, but it turns all of your Wizards into limited mana dorks, and can conveniently make Wizard tokens to snowball in a late-game grind! This card is probably a bit too strong in its current state, based on recent playtests. The Wizard-creating ability will probably need to go up in cost, or the Wizard will need to come in tapped. But the overall effect will stay intact as a fantastic signpost card!

The Painted Wastes // The Unseen Library

The final utility land is a two-sided card that asks you to supply your own Wizards to make it worth your while! Once you get enough discount to justify the cost to transform The Painted Wastes (or even if you’re willing to pay the full 5 mana plus a tap), it becomes an extremely potent multicolor land. The Unseen Library can tap for two mana of any colors, so long as they’re different, and it even gives your Wizards a bit of protection via Ward

In our story, the Unseen Library was the secret sanctuary of wizards out in the iridescent desert canyons known as the Painted Wastes! The Tower of Secrets is technically part of this grand library, though it holds a special significance. But that’s a story for another day….

Only one day left for Lands week! You’ve seen all the unique, new lands included in the Unwell Kingdom, from tri-lands and the many shades of the Illusory Palace, to powerful mono-color effects and support for various themes. There are, of course, five absolutely crucial lands to go:

Tomorrow on Land’s Week: Back to Basics

UWK Lands Week