Pattern Recognition #304 - Leylines

Features Opinion Pattern Recognition

berryjon

9 November 2023

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Hello Everyone! My name is berryjon, and I welcome you all to Pattern Recognition, TappedOut.Net's longest running article series. Also the only one. I am a well deserved Old Fogey having started the game back in 1996. My experience in both Magic and Gaming is quite extensive, and I use this series to try and bring some of that to you. I dabble in deck construction, mechanics design, Magic's story and characters, as well as more abstract concepts. Or whatever happens to catch my fancy that week. Please, feel free to talk about each week's subject in the comments section at the bottom of the page, from corrections to suggested improvements or your own anecdotes. I won't bite. :) Now, on with the show!

And hello again everyone! Today's subject is coming because I ran into one of these cards on Arena last week, and well, it didn't help them. So I figured, why not talk about them?

But first, let's not talk about Ley Line. This is a bad card, and you should never play it, unless you're drafting that colour in a Mercadian Masques limited setting. In which case, you have bigger problems.

Leylines are part of the fundamental Vorthos of Magic, thanks to the occasional drawing of terms in the early years of the game from "real world" concepts and ideas. And I mean those quotation marks completely seriously. Made up whole cloth in the early 20th Century by Europeans with more time on their hands than should have been safe or healthy, these people sought to draw straight lines on a map of the globe to 'prove' that famous or ancient sites and landmarks were connected by some mysterious ... force? Energy? Look, I stopped watching reruns of "In Search Of..." back in the 90's. I have no idea what is going on with this subject in the real world.

In the realm of Magic: The Gathering, Leylines are what make mana work. The natural lines of mana that flow through each of the lands that you play can be tapped for use by a Planeswalker or Player through a process known as mana bonding, a technique which has been alluded to in lore and on cards - Fastbond in particular, but never mechanically represented in the game except when you play a land onto the battlefield.

That's it.

However, some bright soul in game design thought it would be interesting to incorporate the more modern mysticism of the Leyline, where power flowed and intersected, creating points where the whole was greater than the sum of its parts. And so, in the Dissension set, part of the original Ravnica: City of Guilds block, we got Leyline of the Meek, Leyline of Singularity, Leyline of the Void, Leyline of Lightning and Leyline of Lifeforce.

Each of these Enchantments are at Rare, and cost MM. However, beyond that, they all share a single line of text across all of them that elevates this horizontal cycle of cards above being a boring and un-inspired Enchantment set. If any of these cards are in your opening hand, you may begin the game with it in play.

Now, I got confused here, as while when I go out to play Commander, I'll ask if anyone has any Turn 0 plays, and people understand what I am talking about. However, while writing this, I found myself asking - when exactly is Turn 0 and when do these cards get revealed?

Well, as it turns out, it's covered in cr/103.6. Which is to say that after the players have drawn their opening hands and completed all mulligans, then each player may, in turn order, play or reveal any cards in their hand that have a 'while in your opening hand' clause. Cards such as the Leylines, Gemstone Caverns, and the various Chancellors all have their effects take place here.

Only then, once all these effects are resolved, do we move on to cr/103.7 which covers the initial Planechase cards, should that option be in play. And then the First Turn begins.

So that was a nice side bit of research there.

Anyways, because of this facet to their design, the Leylines became really popular. All you had to do was mulligan until the Leyline you wanted was in your opening hand - given that you were running four of them in your 60 card deck, you had... decent-ish odds of getting one to start the game with.

Of course, the downside to this is starting the game with one less card in your hand, but given that the card you are short is a card in play and not in the library or worse, it was seen as a viable trade off. Of course, there was also the possibility of actually drawing and casing them later in the game for their full mana value of , but truth be told, that wasn't always a decent option. The of the Meek, for example, is an Anthem for your token creatures. Yes, this is in , which loves token creatures, but this is an otherwise bad card if you didn't have the chance to play it for free at the start of the game. I'd rather play Honor of the Pure for half the cost, and a wider effect.

Leylines were, as I said, popular, even if they weren't all that good, and in M11, we got another cycle of them, though it had a single reprint for Leyline of the Void. Namely, Leyline of Sanctity, Leyline of Anticipation, Leyline of Punishment and Leyline of Vitality. This cycle has some staying power, especially the first two in control decks, and it helped reinforce the idea to Wizards that there was something worth doing here.

And so in M20, we got one last cycle (for now). Reprints of Sanctity, Anticipation and Void, but added to it Leyline of Combustion and Leyline of Abundance.

This evolution of the Leylines serves as an interesting view into how the fundamental assumptions about the game have evolved over time.

moved from Creature token support over to giving you, the player Hexproof, and never looked back. Now, certainly, cares about creatures and creature tokens, but at the time, this was more of a thing, as this is the block that gave us Doubling Season. And later on, Hexproof was definitely more in 's wheelhouse. Unless you're also , but they got other toys.

's Singularity was a frankly odd effect for most players - right up until they realized that hey, tokens exist, and this format called EDH hadn't been invented yet. Honestly though, at the time, it was sideboard tech against token decks and certain Artifact decks. But the replacement? Good Urza it's probably the most famous and most played one of them all. This card allows you to play your game at instant speed. I've gone over how broken this is when you have cards like Vedalken Orrery in the game. At the same cost, but also with the option to have it enter on turn 0 if you're lucky. Honestly, if you have the option, run both. You won't regret it.

Moving on to , we have the Leyline of the Void, their one single card from start to finish. The Leyline here is an asymmetric Rest in Peace, as it only affects your opponents, and not yourself. This card really needs to see more love and affection. But it is also something of a small effect that shows up more often than not in this colour and in with cards like Bujoka Bog and Tormod's Crypt. And denying resources is something that does with ease.

Next up, we have the three Leylines found in . The first was also the only one I got out of my box of Dissension, or at least the only one I remember. Lightning allows you to turn any spell into a Pinger by paying . Now, to be fair, this is only a very minor effect, but it can work as a means of trimming down tokens, or shaving damage into a Planeswalker. But where this card really shines is in conjunction with Ghyrson Starn, Kelermorph or Ob Nixilis, Captive Kingpin, both of which look for exactly one damage triggers. The second Leyline is that of Punishment. This card is an effect that this colour gets every so often, most recently a year ago with Giant Cindermaw, but perhaps most infamously on Rampaging Ferocidon, a card which ate a Ban for being an Anti-Soul Warden. Finally, the Combustion Leyline is a more active defense for the player, punishing (hah!) the opponents for targeting your stuff. It's another solid effect in this colour, and I get a lot of use out of cards like Harsh Mentor in general to not reject this effect at all.

Lastly, , and their three Leylines. Lifeforce, their first one, has a very simple, but equally very powerful effect. Preventing creatures spells from being countered is not to be underestimated, but it is solidly an anti- card. On the other side of things, it also prevents your opponent's creature spells from being countered. Honestly, I'd rather play Gaea's Herald. The second one, Vitality, looks and feels like a card instead of being Green. The Anthem effect, plus the lifegain is a sign of things to dome, but at the time, it was definitely a bend in the colour pie. I should look in my LGS's bulk bins and see if they have one. Lastly, Abundance. This one saw Standard level play, and that's no an insult. It's a compliment. Turning your dorks - or animated lands - into extra mana producers, with the additional effect of putting +1/+1 counters on all your creatures? This card is amazing!

The Leylines are amazing cards, and they his this beautiful overlap of effectiveness, synergy and theme. That they all share the same basic mana cost means that it is quite possible to have a future Leyline with a casting cost of or even and they can stay on theme. And because of the relatively fixed cost across all of them, it becomes easier to balance. Well, easier in some ways. Harder in others. Four MV cards are actually pretty solid, all things considered, as long as you aren't trying to flex all over Modern.

But these cards were designed with the 60 card deck formats in mind. Because of the way shuffling works, having four of them in your deck means that you have a good chance of getting one of them in your opening hand after a couple tries - I don't have the math in front of me, but I'm sure someone out there has crunched the right numbers. But a single one in a 100 card deck? It's playing to the themes and assumptions of Commander, but getting one in your opening hand is really just luck and a bonus more than anything else. You can't depend on it at all.

And the best part is, none of them are really broken if they enter free. The best, by far, is Anticipation, but it doesn't let you cheat mana costs or untap your permanents. And even that isn't horrible. Just a draw for early removal.

I love the Leylines, and would love to see more of them in the future. Yes, the design space can be narrow, but that's alright, I'm not asking for miracles. Heck, the reprints of them in the Wilds of Eldraine as part of the Enchanted Tales was a nice touch, and they still do occasionally show up in Commander or supplementary products.

What do you guys think of them? Comment below!

Thank you all for sticking with me this week! Join me next week when I talk about something different. What it is, I don't know yet.

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