| WoW:TCG and Duel Masters essentially play like magic without land.
In wow, there are effectively no colors because the deck constraints come during deck building (you HAVE to play cards with keywords matching your heroes as opposed to magic's you SHOULD play cards that are of your colors). In addition, quest card essentially function as a card you would always want to "play as a land" but with an upside. in this way you play with a deck that is closer to approximately 1/4th "land" cards instead of 1/3rd, but you can always play any card as a "land".
In duel masters, it does a similar thing but also has effectively the five colors of magic. An interesting design point is that it puts the mana symbols upside down on the bottom of each colored card, so playing it upside down is an immediate indicator that it is being used as a land. That game never went so far as to introduce multicolor, but it also had weaker mana requirements in that a card of a particular color required you to only pay with at least 1 mana of the appropriate color. Interestingly, it also improved on the magic life system by having fewer "chunks" of life (6 instead of 20) and having them be represented by cards which you drew when they were used up. In this way, someone who was behind would "catch up".
As for magic, pardon me for sounding like a magic purist, but I consider lands to be integral to the game. Indeed, the ability to shift one's mana curve up or down, plan lands appropriately, and use the myriad of non-basics that have come out in the last 5 years to support this is almost as exciting as choosing the actual cards. I have a deck which my friends despise playing against because it is a very powerful wizard deck, yet the deck itself uses very few powerful wizards. Instead it is aggressively curved with many 1,2 and 3 cost wizards as well as cards that key off of number of wizards in play. While my friends struggle to get up to enough mana to make their first or second play of the game i've played a puny wizard on every turn, only to finally play a wizard that turns each of them into a card draw or a counterspell. |