Forum

[RangerWickett]

A friend and I were talking about the occasional complaint that, in any given Magic deck, about a third of your cards are land, and lands are honestly pretty damned boring. Any magic player has memories of drawing your umpteenth land when you needed anything else to win the game. Likewise, both land glut and land screw are unpleasant inherent obstacles to fun gameplay, in my opinion.

I know a few other collectible card games that still have a resource management element do it without having most of your deck be one-use-only resources, and as a thought experiment I'm curious how Magic could have developed differently. Basically, I'm curious about ways that could keep the rest of the game's elements in place - the same turn phases, the same rules interactions, color flavor, etc. - but just not have lands.

One thought was that you could play any card from your hand in a 'land zone,' and cards in the land zone wouldn't have their normal abilities. Instead, they could produce one mana of any color that card was. If we did this, I think the game would value multicolor cards in a much different way, because they become slightly harder to play, but much more useful as resource generators.

Also, it is, I dunno, aesthetically displeasing to have cards in play that don't do what the card says. What's the flavor of playing cards that way? Are you drawing mana from the memory of that spell? From the idea of it?

Another idea was to have a side deck that consists just of lands, and you can choose which one you draw from. This sidesteps the mana screw issue pretty well, though you can still have a hard time if you're playing a multicolored deck. But this likewise suffers from a bit of aesthetic clunkiness.

A third option is to eliminate hand size limits, and instead of playing land, you reveal cards in your hand to produce one mana of any of the card's colors. Once you reveal the card, you set it down and don't get it back until you start your next turn. This dramatically changes the resource management and pace of the game, because you could play a six-mana spell on turn one, and if you want to play a high end spell you'd have to hoard cards for a few turns. Card drawing would become even more powerful. And it still makes multicolor cards more useful than monocolor. I don't think I like this solution.

Do you have any ideas?