Pattern Recognition #258 - The Lands that (almost) Broke the Game

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berryjon

13 October 2022

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Good day everyone! My name is berryjon, and I welcome you all to Pattern Recognition, TappedOut's longest running article series. I am something of an Old Fogey and a definite Smart Ass, and I have been around the block quite a few times. My experience is quite broad and deep, and so I use this series to try and bring some of that to you. Be it deck design, card construction, mechanics or in-universe characters and the history of the game. Or whatever happens to catch my attention each week. Which happens far more often than I care to admit. Please, feel free to talk about my subject matter in the comments at the bottom of the page, add suggestions or just plain correct me.

So, click-bait title aside (hey, it worked, didn't it?), let's talk about the Shock Lands and how they did, in the end, pretty massive damage to the game. I'm not saying they broke the game, but they came, with the benefit of 20 years retrospect, pretty close to it.

So first, some history. When Ravnica: City of Guilds (YES, that's the name of the Set. Not Ravnica by itself) was previewed back in 2005, and one of the first things they did was, after showing off Hybrid Mana, was to reveal the Rare Land cycle for the set. Now, for those who weren't there, the spoiling of Overgrown Tomb, Sacred Foundry, Temple Garden and Watery Grave caused quite a stir in the playerbase. Now, this was Seventeen years ago, so most of you wouldn't have been playing the game at that time, and damn do I feel old, but anyway, when those four lands were shown off, we had no idea what we were getting into.

You see, before Ravnica, all the Rare lands across the game had one thing in common. Well, all of them after Revised and before Ravnica, so about 8 years worth, give or take. And that was that they never had a Basic Land type. There was a acceptance in the game that Basic Lands had the advantage of a type that worked out well when it came to support for the cards, as you had things like Blanchwood Armor or Waiting in the Weeds among others. They called out specific Basic Land types, but aside from the ABUR Dual lands like Taiga, The basic land type, and the land themselves were indistinguishable.

Wood Elves got a Forest. That was their purpose, intent and practical use. You knew exactly what you were getting when you played this card. Land Walk effects were the same, as you could tell at a glance whether or not the ability would work or not. Even Dryad Sophisticate of the same set worked in that fashion as Basic Lands were easy to see and easy to parse out.

The Ravnican Guild duals, soon to be called the Shock Lands for the damage they dealt to you, were instead compared to the existing Pain Lands, such as Karplusan Forest compared to Stomping Ground. The question we asked ourselves back then was if it was worth it to take the two damage up front for the Ravnican Lands or take the 1 damage for the Pain Lands whenever you tapped them for coloured mana. We figured, at the time, that the cost of the Shock Land was priced around the average time that Pain lands hurt their user in a game before non-hurting lands of the right colours came online. And to be fair, it was a pretty logical conclusion.

And besides, if you weren't needing that mana right now, you could have the land enter tapped and get all the benefit of it without the drawback. Shivan Oasis, to stay in , was printed in 8th Edition, so really, the Shock Land was either a case of "Play this one Uncommon type of land and wait, or play this rare version and get hurt a little". The math checked out no matter how you cut it, and that was what made the Shocklands to initially liked. You had the option, which was denied you with other choices.

But you all know where this is going.

People noticed the Land types on the card. At first, this was just seen as a curiosity. Something to synergize with the in-set Farseek which gave the ability mana-fix for their chosen Guild by pulling out the relevant Basic Land, or even the appropriate Shock Land of you wanted. And this was fine. Really fine. People knew how to deal with that sort of thing, and some people even got creative and used Mountain Valley as a slow burn way to get their Shock Land into play, or even used it to go wider with more sources of coloured mana in large formats with 3+ colour decks.

But who makes those anyways? Lands that provide just three colours of mana? Ridiculous!

Yet, in a spectacualr display of a failure to future-proof the game, something that the New World Order sought to fix through more consistent wordings, those players who played larger formats noticed that quite a few cards that let you pull a basic land out of your library could also be used to get these Shock lands into play. Things like the aforementioned Wood Elves and Farseek. I mean, yeah, sure, Terramorphic Expanse would be coming out in the next set, but I don't think Wizards realized what they had done, and it took time for the ramifications of this act to filter through to them. I mean, yes, two year design and development cycle and all that jazz, but when they printed Shard Convergence in Conflux, that was plenty of time for the truth of the matter to percolate back to Wizards and see that there would be problems going forward.

Also, if you're building a five color deck, Shard Convergence is my newest suggestion for people who want to run 5 coloured decks, and it's an under-appreciated card. I just checked, and it's a bulk uncommon at this point.

Anyway, back to this from my research. Because everyone who clicked on this article because of the name, except for the one person I talked to about this weeks ago, probably thought I was going to talk about how the Fetch Lands Ruined Everything.

No, I'm not the Professor of the TolarianCommunityCollege. He has his own opinions, I have mine. And this is my soapbox, not his, so nyeah. You see, there's an abstract concept in game theory that goes all the way back to basic math, and it's something that Combo players exploit to the fullest, even if they don't have the terminology for it, so let me try to simplify things for you all. When you learn basic math, you learn addition. The concept of adding one thing to another is fairly intuitive even for children as it is something they are exposed to every day. Translated into Magic, addition would be playing an additional land each turn. From there you get Subtraction, or removal. A bit more complex as negation also runs into object permanence and you guys should really read some of these articles about that, they're interesting and are applicable even to adults. The concept of 'out of sight, out of mind', writ large, really.

Sorry, but from there, you get the real meat of what I'm getting at. Multiplication. At its simplest, it's repeated addition, you perform the same action over and over again, keep a running tally until you are done. In game theory, however, the equivalent concept is one where the result of an interaction far exceeds the summation of the component parts.

Before Fetchlands, the ability to pull lands from your deck into your hand or into play was mostly the domain of . Yes, there were some very minor exceptions, such as the Slow Fetches like Mountain Valley, but those had a built-in time delay of a mana cost and/or coming into play tapped. Rather, you had Braidwood Sextant, a card I'm pretty sure none of you have heard of before today. You had Gift of Estates and Land Tax or Oath of Lieges - wow, I should see if I can get my hands on that - or Path to Exile.

You see, all these things were additive in nature. You added basic lands. What Fetches did at pretty much instant speed, was be a multiplicative force multiplier to the existence of the SHock Lands. Together, the two of them had an outsized and massive effect on ... let's call it the mana ecosystem of the game. It quickly altered the way that land bases were built and designed in all relevant formats, where you ran Fetches and Shocks and often your first turn play was "I Fetch a Shock" and go from there. Modern has this issue where the sheer prevalence of this was seen as a requirement, and helped drive the prices of the Fetch Lands to ridiculous heights.

But Fetch Lands were not the problem. Taken as they were, they went for basic lands only, which is a design issue for cards designed for Standard when taken out of their comfort zone. Something that happens quite a lot when you look into the cards, really. Rather, Fetches acted as a force multiplier on the already powerful Shock Lands.

Some of you may point to Pioneer and the preemptive banning of the Khans Fetches as the real problem, but it's not. Rather, I see it as part of how Wizards handles bannings. They will ban the older problem cards first, rather than the newer ones. But more importantly, they will ban the more wide-spread utility cards. In this case, taking out the Fetches was a direct response to the issues of Modern, and yet left the more popular Shock Lands in the format as something that wasn't as broken without the support cards.

So there's my hot take. Wizards printed the Shock Lands, and got more than they bargained for. You can even see in the cards printed afterwards how many of them started to specify Basic Lands when searching your library for them, or are priced in terms of mana with the expectation that you could get any land you wanted.

And now we're living with that mistake, and all the fallout from it. I mean, it's not like Wizards decided that having Basic Land types on non-basic lands that produced multiple types of mana was a bad thing. I mean, just look at Sheltered Thicket or Ketria Trinome or Jetmir's Garden or Ziatora's Proving Ground was considered a mistake. They just come into play tapped, no options there. It's not like Life is a resource or anything, is it?

Thanks for reading! Join me next week when I talk about something else. What, I'm not quite sure yet, so feel free to comment in the comments below.

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!