Alright, everyone, I’m getting on my soap box to shout a somewhat warm take: I don’t think Magic: The Gathering should have any land cards at Rare. None at all. Not a one.
Well… okay, maybe certain utility lands might be alright. But if all a land card does is produce mana in one or more colors, well then that should be a common, goddammit!
This came to mind while I was doing some soul searching about Magic’s mana and lands system, which so many modern TCGs do away with. While I ultimately think it’s a net good for the game, the problem it creates when it comes to card prices is significant. Mana-bases are too expensive, and it makes playing proper Constructed, paper Magic incredibly inaccessible.
In certain, very limited ways, things have gotten a little better in recent years. The shock lands have been reprinted numerous times, dropping most of their prices to about $5-10. And the checklands, though not Standard-legal, have been printed in Commander products so many times that most are now less than 50 cents.
But the manabase in your average Standard deck can still be anything from $65 (if it’s not Izzet) to $165 (if it is). A Modern manabase is hundreds of dollars.
This is less expensive than the average competitive deck in every other TCG. The idea that the fundamental, generic tools needed to build an optimized deck should be so costly is honestly ridiculous. It’s insane that this is normalized, and frankly I think Magic can only get away with this because it’s the most popular, dare I say best, card game on the market.
Of course, you can just use basics or play with dual lands that come in tapped, but in a world where the best builds are shared online, anyone making that choice knows full well that their deck is fundamentally worse than their opponents’. They will lose games simply because they didn’t have enough money to put the right lands in their deck. Not a great feeling.
As far as I can see, there’s one simple reason why good two-color lands are kept at rare: it helps sell packs. Murders at Karlov Manor is a great example. This relative dud of a set had a great new land cycle, the surveil lands, which I’m sure motivated many to purchase packs they would otherwise have left on the shelf.
But in my view, lands at rare only help to sell packs because they’re so frustrating to purchase otherwise. Opening a rare land is a joy purely because buying rare lands is a misery. No one likes spending their money on the boring part of their deck. The feeling of cracking a rare land card is not truly one of excitement at what you opened, but relief at future pain spared.
With lands out of the rare slot, your joy could be saved for a /proper/ chase rare. Whether that’s a cool card you can get amped about adding to your deck, or a valuable staple like Artist’s Talent, it’ll be a much more positive experience psychologically than finding a land – the sort of experience that WotC should want its game to be associated with.
It’s pretty hard to argue that a company should make a decision that would lose them money, so the ‘rare lands sell packs’ counterpoint is fairly ironclad. However, I also think making mana bases less hideously pricey is the single best step WotC could take to reinvigorate paper Magic outside of commander, and that should provide a financial incentive.
Forget all this fannying about with longer rotations and different ban cadences – none of that has made a difference. If you made it easier for more folks to at least try the game in a semi-competitive fashion, it could be a massive growth driver.
Right or wrong, that’s how I’d try and pitch the idea to Wizards. Mainly, I just think the whole concept of lands at rare stinks.
Source: Wargamer
