Thursday, March 26, 2009

[Land Week] Card of the Day - Sun-Scorched Waste

The Ancient Byzantine Wisdom staff (Grell) is very pleased usher in the fourth day of land week. Tomorrow, because of Land Friday, ABW will showcase two lands. Saturday and Sunday we'll present the winner of the mechanic search's round three. This is, understandably, too exciting. So today's card should help bore you back to normal.




Set one in a block - reintroduce poison counters. Have a few good cards that work well together so that poison quickly becomes a dominant standard deck.
Set two - Print Sun-Scorched Waste. Watch as poison suffers.
Set three - Print a 3-mana land destruction spell that gives your opponent a poison counter. Party.

Sun-Scorched Waste is a flavor disaster. I can think of no reason why a blighted snowscape (good card name) would have anything at all to do with preventing poisoning.

Original Art

7 comments:

  1. You could rename it something like "Curare Field" or something similar.

    -Nameless One

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  2. Thank you thank you thank you. I have been building a BOO set for awhile and I needed something that was both shiny, Plains-like and totally desolate. I beat my head against DA for half an hour before giving up. And this is perfect.

    Incidentally, the land is called Coruscant Steppes and is a land with with a forecast ability that turns things into Plains and taps for however many lands are glassed like that when its actually in play.

    Also, to prove that there is really never enough fantasy art on the internet: I used the same art you did for Crystal Spire for a card called Mox Caverns. Prismatic land with Echo 2. I tried to make some combination of "you may play an additional land" + Echo balanced, but no one in my potential draft group would be satisfied.

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  3. Mox Caverns is really cool. I've been playing around with ways to make lands cost mana for a while. Most of my stuff involves fiddling with charge counters. I never thought of echo.

    Oh, and two questions: What is BOO, and can I make a set?

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  4. BOO stands for Build Our Own. Long story short, it's what we're both already doing anyway. The reason there's a forum for it is because there are a bunch of magic players at my school who got on board with the idea of each making a mini-set of 45 cards and having a draft.

    It's sort of a magic pot-luck dinner of Magic, except that (as a quick look over some of these sets taught me) some of the people bringing food think it'd be really cool to just make food that tries to overpower everyone else's with its dazzling synergies and occasionally deranged power level.

    Also, everyone wanted to try their hand at "efficient-er version of already good card with a drawback." So the format seems set to be kind of brutal.

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  5. Also, as far as making lands cost mana: Rupture Spire and Lotus Vale are sort of the gold standards on this one. Lotus Vale is worded so that you can play it, but you have to pay the cost before it'll actually come into play.

    The only difficulty is that CIPT is already a major disadvantage in any constructed format, and any land strong enough to require it is likely to be broken by how few colors can actually effectively deal with lands...

    Lastly, concerning weird abilities to stick on lands for fun: Ninjutsu.

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  6. Just stick flying on a land for the hell of it.

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  7. Ninjutsu on a land? That's an awesome idea, if you could get it to work flavorfully. Madness is another ability I like on my lands.

    -Nameless One (eleventy two wizards)

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Empty your mind.