Tuesday, May 29, 2018

The Cost of Colorless

I've been saying for years that Wizards has difficulties whenever it does an artifact heavy set: the card type is too easy to put into any deck and doesn't have enough hate, leading to a permanent type that becomes easy to abuse.

But I've been a bit overfocused, because the game has evolved to include mere colorless permanents and those have been causing their own issues, too. Ugin, Karn, the Eldrazi...and with new Karn making appearances in many decks and likely being the most fiscally expensive card from Dominaria by a large margin, the fine people at MTGgoldfish have taken the issue of colorless cards head on.

The proposed solution isn't bad but it presents a problem from a story perspective: Wastes-colorless mana producing lands-aren't present on other planes. I suppose they could be but that isn't how Wizards tends to operate. These aren't deserts, a land type that conceivably could be found in any mythological world, but something generated by the Eldrazi themselves draining colored mana from the plane. Since Eldrazi aren't everywhere, how do you reliably generate colorless mana now?

What I come back to is the need for proper answers. There isn't enough artifact hate or planeswalker responses-the colors tend to have ways to check against themselves-white's lifegain vs red's direct damage, for example. But there hasn't been a similar way to handle a card type. It's always been more about responding to a color's philosophy.

What is the countermeasure to a philosophy that doesn't exist?

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