Pattern Recognition #211 - Mana Symbols

Features Opinion Pattern Recognition

berryjon

16 September 2021

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Hello everyone! This is Pattern Recognition, TappedOut.Net's longest running article series as written by myself, berryjon. I am something of an Old Fogey who has been around the block quite a few times where Magic is concerned, as as such, I use this series to talk about the various aspects of this game, be it deck design, card construction, mechanics chat, in-universe characters and history. Or whatever happens to cross my mind this week. Please, feel free to dissent in the comments below the article, add suggestions or just plain correct me! I am a Smart Ass, so I can take it.

Today's subject is one that came about because I heard - again - a certain false assertion about the way the game is designed. And given that this is a false assertion that has been repeated by Wizards, yes, I find myself in a position where I must point out one of the flaws in the game that Wizards has chosen to ignore at best, or actively enables at the worst.

And to do that, I will need to invoke a very old meme, and if you get it, you're an Old Fogey, like me.

MANA SYMBOLS ARE NOT DIFFICULT

So, what brought this on? Oh, just the usual round of people complaining or stating that cards would be hard to cast because they had multiple mana symbols on them, that colours can be splashed and enabled for some difficulty or ease. And I'm going to stand on this soap box of mine, and show you all what's up and what is really going on, from Draft to Commander.

But to do that, let's start at the beginning. With Alpha.

At that time, for the vast majority of people, decks tended to be mono-coloured. In fact, it wasn't until Invasion block that even I finally got out of that rut and started running multi-coloured decks as my norm. But back to where I started. When the game started, mono-coloured decks were the norm. And this wasn't because of any ability run multiple colours, you could, in fact do such a thing.

But for most of the players at the time, building a multi-colored deck was more akin to building two smaller mono-colored decks and merging them together. A 60 card deck might be 30 cards green, and 30 cards red, and you basically rolled the dice on making sure that you had enough Forests or Mountains to play your cards in a timely manner. If you were lucky, you might have a Mox Emerald that you could play for free to go with your mana base, or even a Taiga that could do the job of both lands. But for the most part, decks were built around a single color, and you needed to spend money if you wanted to try and build a two-colored deck. Three colours? Yeah, not going to happen.

And this was the state of the game from Alpha through Unlimited. Which is to say, not very long. When we got to Ice Age and the introduction of the Pain Land. These were lands that could tap for one of two different colours of (Allied) Mana, but you took 1 point of damage in the process. The cycle would be completed in Invasion with the Enemy coloured lands.

Anyway, what I mean to get with this is that with the publishing of these lands, we, the players got something that was quite welcome, yet at the same time quite dangerous. You see, what we got was redundancy.

Let me explain. Let us create a hypothetical mana base for a deck. We have 22 lands, and of those, we had 4 Tundra, 9 Plains, and 9 Plains. This deck has 13 sources of each colour, though four of those sources can go either way. It's nice to have but there's no guarantee that you'll see any of those Tundra's in the game. After all, there's only four of them.

Now, let's take that same deck, and move it from Alpha to Ice Age. Let's add Adarkar Wastes. This deck now has 4 Tundra, 4 Adarkar Wastes, 7 Plains and 7 Island. Now we have a deck with 8 sources of both colours and 7 of each individual colour. With two sets of dual lands, the odds of getting one in the opening hand? Well, there's 8 cards in a 60 card deck, and I can't do math. I'm sure people smarter than me can figure out the numbers.

But the point is, with this second round of cards that provided mana, the ability of a two-colored deck to hit all its necessary colours became much easier.

Yet this isn't where it started. There was a card printed before Ice Age that didn't get as much traction, and oh, who am I kidding. Ever heard of City of Brass? This card? Yeah. This card was printed before the Pain lands, and the Pain Lands were basically a case of "Oh god, City of Brass is too powerful! Tone it down! Tone it down!" So, everything I just said about having a second land that could provide two types of mana? Well, here's a third. That's 4/4/4/5/5 for this hypothetical deck. There are more sources of two colours of mana than there are sources of one colour.

Do you see where I'm going with this? Yes? Great! No? Well, let me keep going.

Mirage isn't well known to most players. In fact, if you asked a lot of players, they would file it in that haze of cards that is pre-Modern format. And to be fair, they're not wrong. It didn't really make a splash in terms of constructed at the time, and was paired with the Weatherlight set as part of the lead up to Urza's Block. Yeah. That. It's hard to exist in that shadow.

But one of the things that this set really codified was a better balanced and no so horrifically overpowered mana rock. These were Charcoal Diamond, Fire Diamond, Marble Diamond, Moss Diamond and Sky Diamond. These cards were seen as properly costs artifact based mana acceleration - for the time, of course. You paid , you got an additional source of mana, though they entered tapped, so you couldn't use them until turn 3. It was an elegant solution.

But here's the thing - this was the sort of card that you could put in, not just to augment your existing mana base; allowing you to have mana available on turn 3 for any colour, ,not just green. But to diversify it. If all you have in your opening hand is two Island and a Fire Diamond, you still have a source of on turn 3, even though you don't have a Mountain or a Volcanic Island.

It was slow to reach that extra colour source of mana, yes, but the game was far different in those days. In fact, seeing the whole cycle reprinted in Commander Legends was quite a pleasant surprise.

From here, what I'm getting at is that, starting at about Invasion with the Cameo cycle of artifacts, like Troll-Horn Cameo, and a printing of the enemy colored Pain lands such as Yavimaya Coast, the idea of multi-colored decks became more casual and accessible to new players who weren't going to drop mega-bucks on a few cards.

Odyssey gave us Filer lands, where you paid to get MN in terms of mana, Mossfire Valley. Onslaught gave us the Fetch Lands, and wow are we ever living in the shadow of those. Mirrordin only had two rare lands, but had the Talisman cycle for mana fixing in artifacts. Kamigawa didn't have Rare duals either.

Then Ravnica.

The whole point of this article? Well, if it wasn't for Ravnica, I don't think it would be to this point. Ravnica gave us the Shock Lands. Lands like Watery Grave that came into play tapped unless you paid two life.

For a whole year, the players were given a complete and comprehensive set of dual lands. One for each pairing. And they all acted the exact same way. In addition, we got the Signets. You know, like Selesnya Signet. Mana fixing was IN, and IN in a big way.

Then next year, with Future Sight, we got more Dual Lands! Then Lorwyn gave us more! And Alara gave us Triple-fetches! And the Signposts!

What started with Ravnica was that the popularity of the Shock Lands meant that each set thereafter included Dual Lands in the rare slot. This has become a given in the game that it took until Adventures in the Forgotten Realms for there to be a real gap of a set without. Previous, Strixhaven had the Snarls, while Midnight Hunt has allied coloured lands, like Haunted Ridge. And I think we'll get the enemy colours in Crimson Vow.

So what is the point of all this? Why am I complaining about mana fixing and the preponderance of dual lands?

BECAUSE MANA SYMBOLS ARE NOT DIFFICULT

There are people out there, including at Wizard, who think that adding more mana symbols to a card makes them more difficult to cast. From the third Ravnica block, we were given Niv-Mizzet, Parun, and his casting cost of was supposed to be, you know, hard.

Not.

A.

Chance.

I just mentioned that Ravnica was the sort of set where colour-fixing was easy, and the third block was no different. From Steam Vents to Izzet Guildgate to Izzet Locket, generating that mana cost wasn't hard. It wasn't difficult.

Take the infamous casting cost. This is easy. Heck, there's a deck in standard that plays The Prismatic Bridge  ^Flip and just cheats out value.

edit from writing

So, two days before this article comes out, Golos, Tireless Pilgrim got banned in Commander. The vital reason this card got the hit was because of his activated ability. Paying in Standard was easy enough that he was banned in Brawl long before he got the boot from Commander. Standard was so flush with mana fixing that he got banned. In an eternal format like Commander? It's amazing he lasted this long. Lands that generated any type of mana, cards that cast for free?

FREE SPELLS ARE BAD!

back from edit

These sorts of decks are often called "Five Colour Good Stuff", and the theme behind them is that you're really not playing a deck that has a purpose, but rather, your mana base is so redundant, so comprehensive, that you can play any card you want in the deck, all the good cards that you have, and the mana base can support it. I got to watch our own no-longer-actively-contributing zandl, and his Standard decks around the time of Kaladesh and Amonkhet broke this archetype out on occasion and trampled all over Arena because people had no idea what to do with it.

Something that I remember from a while ago, which should be true still today, is that when you look at decks and just the colors they run, the order in terms of popularity tends to be 2 colours - 1/3 colours - 5 colours - 4 colours.

Two colour decks are easy to synergize, while 1 and three color decks have different problems, but the mana base isn't one of them, it's getting the cards to work together. And having a five colour deck is in fact easier than having a 4 colour deck because by the time you reach four colours, pushing up to five actually makes deck building easier. Because at the very least, you can get full use out of City of Brass, Mana Confluence, and things like Crystal Quarry become available.

So with all this, what am I trying to say?

Well, let's stop thinking of the number of mana symbols on a card as a measure of how difficult it is to cast, and start viewing them as a measure of time.

A card with a single mana symbol is playable on turn 1. Tundra Wolves is a Turn 1 play. A card that costs is, depending on resources, a Turn 1 play, but is intended to be a turn 2 play. Serra Angel has a total mana value of 5, but only has two in the cost, so if you're astoundingly lucky, you can play it on turn 2, but it is intended to hit the battlefield on turn 5. You're more likely to get it on turn 3, or on the mean, turn 4.

The above example of Niv-Mizzet, Parun? That's an example of a turn 6 card, but with acceleration like the Lockets, you could hit it on turn 5 with Standard cards, or even earlier with larger formats.

And whenever someone says that is hard? It's not. It really isn't. It's a turn 5 play. At the latest.

You want to know why Coalition Victory is banned in Commander?

Beacuse it's too easy to cast. Oh, and it completely ignores interaction. But it's still too easy.

So that's my point. The mana cost can no longer be considered a way to measure if a card is 'hard to cast' or not. There is far too much mana fixing in the game to make multi-coloured decks in any way, shape or form 'difficult'. Just... tedious at times. They're better measures of when Wizards intends for the card to hit the table. Honestly, the only format were major color pips are an issue nowadays is in Limited, but even that's been alleviated by Wizard putting common duals, like Lifelands into the land slot of packs on occasion. Or Guildgates for Ravnica.

And there's little that can be done to fix this, if it's an issue at all. Standard rotates, so that would be two years of limited mana fixing, just to set up a format that can't play 5CGoodStuff.dec, which will annoy players to no end that lesser colour pairings are getting the hose at the same time. And eternal formats don't care. They have all that they need. Except Pioneer, but that's because the Fetches are banned.

Because if I have to put a pin in the problem, it's "Zendikar/Tarkir Fetchland goes for Ravnica Shockland" as the seminal turn 1 play for Modern if not Commander, and when you can pick and choose your mana drops perfectly, what's the point in there being any colors at all? Just play what you want.

Join me next week, when I celebrate by fifth year on TappedOut.net! Woo-hoo!

Until then please consider donating to my Pattern Recognition Patreon. Yeah, I have a job, but more income is always better. I still have plans to do a audio Pattern Recognition at some point, or perhaps a Twitch stream. And you can bribe your way to the front of the line to have your questions, comments and observations answered!