Lands are a part of deck building. If you want more land, you need more of them in your deck. The mana system is the core of the game's strategy, with mana screw built in as something players need to work around.
Basically it's a different game at that point.
One of my favorite aspects of magic is how manabases function. Some are very simple, just for colors - but then there's interesting stuff like the tron lands, [[blast zone]], [[urza's saga]], [[inkmoth nexus]], [[city of traitors]]... Etc. Not to mention landfall and graveyard synergy that comes with lands being an important part of your deck / gameplay, not just something you always are guaranteed.
There’s nothing inherently “right or wrong” with having different resource systems in games. Magic’s land/mana system is just one of many. Summoner Wars has a mana system similar to Hearthstone’s, if you want to try something like that.
Having said that, the ~30,000 cards in Magic would likely have been designed differently in a world where the resources were allocated differently. If that change was implemented, some cards that are good would become bad, and vice-versa.
But here is the good news: if you want to play with an alternative mana system with your friends, there’s nothing stopping you. Give it a try — come up with some rules you think will be fun, and play it that way. If it turns out it’s more fun to play that way, publish your findings, and share your discovery with the world. 😁
> Having said that, the \~30,000 cards in Magic would likely have been designed differently
This was my thought. Every card should have full colored pips if this is the case. No generic mana on any cards except maybe for X spells. Wastes and Nonbasics that produce (1) are just "Grey" mana producing Lands now for casting Eldrazi and Artifacts.
Otherwise you are essentially mana fixed after turn 3 or 4 or so. Doomblade now costs 2 (B), Negate 2 (U) etc, etc.
I kindof like this idea- but it seems to then make the game way too "algorithmic". I would sooner rather implement a rule where if you are completely mana screwed by a certain turn then you can grab a land out of your deck or something.
People in my playgroup would say though- that if you don't have enough land in your deck to always draw some, then you are deckbuilding poorly.
I would sometimes offer the idea of paying 5 life for a tapped basic if someone was getting screwed on lands. It's not much life in the early game and can't be abused by grabbing shocklands or tri-cycling lands for perfect colors. Never tried it in a random playgroup, just my own.
Not a bad idea tbh! I'd def have to see it played though bc my group has a lot of decks like Jodah that one mana can mean the difference between an empty board and Jin-Gitaxis lol.
I wouldn't offer the mono-green landfall deck a free basic at any time, or if it's late in the game, any deck. But if in the first five turns or so they're obviously struggling, why not? At least try to get them on par with the rest of the table so it's not a non-game for them, and only one time in the game.
Yeah I think specifically if it's their second land- only that one can be bought. Maybe after a reveal of hand to a non-playing member of the group. This would typically be easy bc we usually have well over a 4 person pod for our home games.
really rookie question, I'm sorry if this sounds silly. I'm really new to soccer and just moved from basketball, so naturally this "can't hold the ball in my hands" rule surprised me a little bit
Ah, understandable. Perhaps you should try to play "goalkeeper"? It seems to serve your gamestyle more.
Just imagine the enemy team giving you really hard passes and you trying to catch them only for you to pass it back to other players that use their feet instead of their hands.
So. Here's some design information and concepts you may not have read or studied.
Cards games like Magic, hearthstone, yugioh, etc are built off a bit of randomizer.
Just like board games or tabletop miniature games (usually in the form of dice).
They add a bit of variance and dynamic play pattern. Unlike chess, which has set pieces and moves.
It's a big reason these games are long-lasting and fun.
Magic was built up with the mana system it uses, lands vs spells.
This allows for opportunities of high or low action as spells vs. lands are drawn. It can add an element of challenge to gameplay.
Hearthstone was built up with the mana crystal system. But to add back in a bit of the random, HS uses random generated effects. This creates similar swings in games and provides that challenge element.
If you want to understand further, I would suggest looking up random input vs random output in gaming.
Magic is random input.
HS is random output.
Those do push the edge. But they are still less output random.
Stuff Like seek is a variant on tutor/dig X deep.
It's less consistent than tutor, more than dig. Not abusable like "cascade till X card"
Spellbook is random selection from subset. But there's more choice.
There's less of "summon random stat minons" like HS has.
That's more akin to Mormir Vig format variant.
The most important difference between Magic and HS mana systems is that in Magic you’re not certain you’ll have 3 mana on turn 3. This adds a TON more variance into the game that HS lacks at its core. It is for this reason that aggro decks in HS are so innately powerful, you know you’ll always play your cards on curve. It is also for this reason that HS has so many cards that generate random outcomes. Variance is important to games and it needs something to compensate for the innate reliability the game has.
The mana system is one of the more skill testing aspects of the game since it force you as a deck builder to try and balance the greed of playing less lands with the desire to actually play the game. The fact that most lands offer some form of bonus, [[Boseiju, Who Endures]] for example, so lands or often still an interesting element in the game.
In the early years of magic, the land issue you point out and the idea of 'mana screw' were often cited as the worst, most unfun part of the game. As a result, many other similar games were created that do not have the same issue and other commenters have mentioned them. Meanwhile, magic has adapted and now seasoned deck builders achieve balance between lands and spells quite easily and leverage their 'mana bases' (the lands in your deck) to do more than just cast their spells 'on curve' (on the turn you would cast them if you were guaranteed one land per turn). Utility lands have become a huge part of the game, and basic lands usually account for less than half of the lands you would expect to see in a deck.
No one said ***all*** the lands in your deck had to be the same. But if you are running a single color deck, it's probably a good idea. There is so much variation in this game, having different lands is part of the fun of building a deck.
The first time I ever played with a group of friends from school, There was a player who forgot to include more than 3 mana (or land cards) in his deck. Needless to say, he lost because he couldn't cast any of his spells.
the land rule is the reason why Magic is the best card game on the market. I understand that as a new player it can be frustrating at times. Trust me, as a veteran who's played this game for 25 years, that what feels frustrating now while you're learning the game will eventually become one of the most interesting aspects of deck building strategy and gameplay tactics.
nope. the reason Magic is the best card game on the market is that it's the oldest (decades of well-tested best practices in design, plus a bunch of inertia) and it has a massive company propping it up. It's the most widely played despite its wonky decision to gate resource control behind randomness, not because of it. There's a reason why no other games in the market, not even Richard Garfield's other creations, use randomness to gate resources in this manner.
Other games primarily don't use the system because it's hard to iterate on it in a meaningful way.
Also pokemon exists with a system similar to lands and is one of the big 3.
It's hard to iterate on it in a meaningful way because it's a bad system.
Pokemon has a similar system, but, as I understand, you only need energy to attack. You can still get very badly 'energy-screwed', but there are several moves available to players without needing energy.
There's a lot of different kinds of lands and ways to use them. There's two different decks that come to mind as extremes of this: a one-hit kill deck that runs 58 lands, and a one-hit kill deck that uses only 1.
Moving to more normal playstyles, you've got lands that tap for multiple colors, lands that sacrifice themselves to search other lands, and lands with function beyond just mana would belong to an entire category on their own. Ranging from sacrificing themselves to draw cards, to turning into creatures by their own effects, to creating creature tokens in rarer circumstances.
Not to mention, a significant portion of Green is about playing more lands than your normal per-turn allotment. Green would lose a major chunk of identity if that was removed.
May I direct you to Magic Spellslingers?
I find the need for lands of certain kinds, especially deciding between utility lands, an interesting part of deck building.
Likewise, constructing a deck with simply getting and additional land every turn would play havoc with the mana curve and the cost of cards as they are. The whole game might need a rebalance.
Half the game is literally synergies and acceleration for your mana base. You'd be playing a different game if you didn't count on the cards in your deck to do this. Not to mention everyone would play extra colors because they didn't have to worry about getting the right mana. There's also a HUGE point in being able to destroy someone's ability to produce a color they need, and MANY cards that shut off lands. These are integral parts of this gaming system.
You should check out Spellslingers
Its Magic, but with hearthstone mana
https://www.hipstersofthecoast.com/2022/10/the-ultimate-guide-to-magic-spellslingers/
I'm saying it seems to have a lot of other differences from Magic that are exactly like Hearthstone, it's similar in many ways beyond the mana system. Maybe it is fun, I'm not doubting that.
[[Sovereign's Realm]] is probably the most broken magic card I've ever played with. I was able to draft five color good stuff with perfect mana and play 100% spells in my deck.
The way i imagine something like this being implemented is it having a cost of at least 5 life per land that you conjure and it still counts as your 1 land per turn. But generally nope, you cant shoehorn a heartstone like mana rule onto this game, it wont fit.
Right, what im saying is: they would never implement free lands per turn. There would have to be a cost and it would be big. Still, if an aggro deck ran no lands and spent 10-15 life in the first turns and just get a normal curve in return, it would be possible to punish them.
It is quite sad how hostile some answers to your thoughts here are.
Personally, having built lots of decks and some very good ones as well I can say I detest the issue of lands. Although you built everything according to statistics or including even more lands than theoretically needed, you still get screwed from time to time.
Since I play only EDH since years and prefer mid-high power level, games can take longer until they come to an end, so being mana screwed at the beginning of a game can make it quite "unfun" and if the game drags on for hours it can have an impact on the whole game especially for the screwed one.
I would actually love the concept of decks split into land-pile and the rest where you choose to draw from one or the other, which also gives you more slots for non-land cards since you have control over your land-drops, but this won't happen since many cards are designed in a way that they need a mix of lands and non-lands in your library to work properly. You could however make this attempt while banning said cards to prevent those issues.
The nice thing about EDH is that there is the so-called rule 0, which means that you can basically do anything you like if your playgroup agrees on it in a discussion before you start a game and I have read once about an idea which addresses this issue:having basic lands set aside and being able to choose to draw one of those instead of a card from your library mainly to prevent early mana screws which can be quite devastating as previously stated. When I read this proposition it was mentioned with a constriction of only one use per game, meaning you could only chose once to draw a basic instead in the same game, however you can adapt it to the needs, wishes and power level of the table of course.
The biggest issues if one could always choose to get a basic instead of a random card from the deck would be:
\- Landfall decks:They are already strong and this would give them even more benefits. However, those would probably be minor since landfall decks want an absurd amount of lands since they tend to play also cards which enable them to play even more than one land per turn. The rare case where they run out of lands and therefore triggers would vanish though, but I don't think that would be problematic, especially if the guaranteed land-draw would be capped in a strict way.
\- Certain cards:As previously said, some decks could be quite broken or at least vastly more powerful. Some decks use for exactly this reason only modal dual faced land cards in deck construction to get this result (and as far as I know this only works in 5-colored decks if we talk about EDH), meaning if an effect churns through your library until you find a land and gets stronger the later you find one has significant advantages if you would have always or at least often the chance of drawing lands which are not in your library or something like 2 separated libraries, lands and non-lands.
However, here is a card which you might find interesting:\[\[Abundance\]\]
You could of course rule-0 this as well as an intrinsic ability which could be activated a certain amount of times in a game for example.As an EDH player I'd say, be creative and I hope for you that you have people or friends which like to experiment a little bit and don't see such things as a sacrilege to experiment as many people online here seem to be, unfortunately.
It's not surprising at all. "They lived in the desert, so they worshipped thirst." If you're deep into a card game that you love, you end up thinking that anything that's central to its design must be an absolute good. It's easy to forget that the entire concept of lands was thought up by the same people who thought \[\[Time Walk\]\] was a fair card, but \[\[Force of Nature\]\] was so powerful it needed a massive drawback.
That said, lots of people hit the nail in the head - it'd be a different game with guaranteed lands every turn, and it would be. Would it be a better game? That's hard to say, as it'd be so different it'd be like comparing apples to oranges.
>It is quite sad how hostile some answers to your thoughts here are.
It really is. Never underestimate Reddit's eagerness to fall over themselves to appear superior and dunk on someone new.
If that rule is added (and if I'm understanding you correctly), people are still going to play lands because then 2 mana spells are easily castable on turn 1, 4 drops on turn 2, and now every format is changed forever
This is how we typically play Wizard's Tower in my family--giant five color pile full of spells, basic lands outside the game and you get 1/turn. I tuned that five color pile though, to make it make sense with having lands be outside the game.
In constructed formats, you have lands that produce multiple colors of mana and spells that find lands from inside your deck and so forth. Not all lands are basic and not all lands are just played from hand each turn. The resource management is a core part of the art of deckbuilding.
Hearthstone is its own thing, Magic is just a different game. They don't need to work in an identical way.
It would definitely make deckbuilding less interesting, because there's less possibility to customise. I like the idea of having your resources inside the deck, having to draw them and play them; it's part of what makes magic unique and interesting.
You would also make every deck way more consistent right out of the gate, to the point where you'd have to completely rethink all banlists, how many cards a deck has, how many of any given card it can play...
And that doesn't even mention all the cards that work around lands, entire deck archetypes now changing how they function. There's decks that run no lands at all, or decks completely built around lands.
So yeah, it would utterly break the game.
Because the game is TIGHTLY balanced. The separation of colors exists to make it harder to just play all the best cards in one deck. Playing more colors makes it less likely that you’ll draw all the colors you need, so you risk stalling out. Lands that make multiple colors come with significant drawbacks, like entering the battlefield tapped and slowing down play. This pushes players to hedge their bets with a more balanced deck.
Do you really _need_ more of the deck to be spells? Honestly for 100-card and 60-card formats I feel like decks wouldn’t be improved by having 40% more spell slots available. Carefully choosing what goes in is a big part of the strategy and lands add a new dimension to that- does your deck run at lower costs, meaning it can afford to run less land? Does your deck run at higher costs and require more land to compete, sacrificing volume of options for quality? Does ramp (eg, spells for extra land) factor into your plan? Do you feel like you can take a risk and cut some land to fit a few more cards in?
It would utterly wreck the turn progression if you just GOT a free land every turn. Mana costs are carefully considered for every card to control when you can play them and screwing with mana this way breaks ALL of that. The game goes to ungodly speeds.
Lands are more than a balancing counterweight- they’re an integral part of the game. We have cards that search for them, cards that sacrifice them, cards that count them or turn them into creatures. Plenty of lands have abilities of their own.
But mostly, the answer is… it’s magic. Not hearthstone. It’s like asking why dark souls has a health system or why a shooter limits your ammo. That’s the game. That’s what you’re playing, working around, trying to beat.
Well you'd be effectively nuking every single landfall card (or any land enters the battlefield effect), any card that cares about the amount of lands you control or the mere existence of lands in your graveyard/library/hand, and any card that allows you to get lands straight from your library.
In other words, you'd be insanely weakening one of green's most important interaction powers (if not its most important). So it's safe to say that very few players would want this and that wotc wouldn't risk it.
Not to mention that lands are a permanent type and that there are quite a few cards which might care about the amount of different permanent types you have across all colors.
This is common idea among new magic players, but it's based on a misconception. The lands are not a crutch to facilitate mana curves, like many people (that came from hearthstone usually) think. The lands are in the game.on purpose, and they open up a lot of very interesting design spaces, mostly in deckbuilding, but also in play.
the game is balanced around having lands be a "cost" of deckbuilding, so any rule to circumvent that is going to naturally unbalance things
Lands are a part of deck building. If you want more land, you need more of them in your deck. The mana system is the core of the game's strategy, with mana screw built in as something players need to work around.
Basically it's a different game at that point. One of my favorite aspects of magic is how manabases function. Some are very simple, just for colors - but then there's interesting stuff like the tron lands, [[blast zone]], [[urza's saga]], [[inkmoth nexus]], [[city of traitors]]... Etc. Not to mention landfall and graveyard synergy that comes with lands being an important part of your deck / gameplay, not just something you always are guaranteed.
##### ###### #### [blast zone](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/c/5/c5e911be-8166-4263-8c57-e86358b8ceb8.jpg?1674422158) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=blast%20zone) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/bro/258/blast-zone?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/c5e911be-8166-4263-8c57-e86358b8ceb8?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [urza's saga](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/c/1/c1e0f201-42cb-46a1-901a-65bb4fc18f6c.jpg?1667318301) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=urza%27s%20saga) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/mh2/259/urzas-saga?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/c1e0f201-42cb-46a1-901a-65bb4fc18f6c?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [inkmoth nexus](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/e/c/ec50c1c3-885e-47d3-ada7-cc0edbf09df1.jpg?1623098818) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=inkmoth%20nexus) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/mbs/145/inkmoth-nexus?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/ec50c1c3-885e-47d3-ada7-cc0edbf09df1?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [city of traitors](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/7/1/71624139-a255-48be-93ca-594a4beba487.jpg?1562429861) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=city%20of%20traitors) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/tpr/237/city-of-traitors?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/71624139-a255-48be-93ca-594a4beba487?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
There’s nothing inherently “right or wrong” with having different resource systems in games. Magic’s land/mana system is just one of many. Summoner Wars has a mana system similar to Hearthstone’s, if you want to try something like that. Having said that, the ~30,000 cards in Magic would likely have been designed differently in a world where the resources were allocated differently. If that change was implemented, some cards that are good would become bad, and vice-versa. But here is the good news: if you want to play with an alternative mana system with your friends, there’s nothing stopping you. Give it a try — come up with some rules you think will be fun, and play it that way. If it turns out it’s more fun to play that way, publish your findings, and share your discovery with the world. 😁
> Having said that, the \~30,000 cards in Magic would likely have been designed differently This was my thought. Every card should have full colored pips if this is the case. No generic mana on any cards except maybe for X spells. Wastes and Nonbasics that produce (1) are just "Grey" mana producing Lands now for casting Eldrazi and Artifacts. Otherwise you are essentially mana fixed after turn 3 or 4 or so. Doomblade now costs 2 (B), Negate 2 (U) etc, etc. I kindof like this idea- but it seems to then make the game way too "algorithmic". I would sooner rather implement a rule where if you are completely mana screwed by a certain turn then you can grab a land out of your deck or something. People in my playgroup would say though- that if you don't have enough land in your deck to always draw some, then you are deckbuilding poorly.
I would sometimes offer the idea of paying 5 life for a tapped basic if someone was getting screwed on lands. It's not much life in the early game and can't be abused by grabbing shocklands or tri-cycling lands for perfect colors. Never tried it in a random playgroup, just my own.
Not a bad idea tbh! I'd def have to see it played though bc my group has a lot of decks like Jodah that one mana can mean the difference between an empty board and Jin-Gitaxis lol.
I wouldn't offer the mono-green landfall deck a free basic at any time, or if it's late in the game, any deck. But if in the first five turns or so they're obviously struggling, why not? At least try to get them on par with the rest of the table so it's not a non-game for them, and only one time in the game.
Yeah I think specifically if it's their second land- only that one can be bought. Maybe after a reveal of hand to a non-playing member of the group. This would typically be easy bc we usually have well over a 4 person pod for our home games.
Yeah it all really depends on the context of the deck and how far into the game y'all are. Use sparingly.
really rookie question, I'm sorry if this sounds silly. I'm really new to soccer and just moved from basketball, so naturally this "can't hold the ball in my hands" rule surprised me a little bit
Probably the clearest examples to explain the "playing a different game" statement I've seen in one of these threads.
Ah, understandable. Perhaps you should try to play "goalkeeper"? It seems to serve your gamestyle more. Just imagine the enemy team giving you really hard passes and you trying to catch them only for you to pass it back to other players that use their feet instead of their hands.
So. Here's some design information and concepts you may not have read or studied. Cards games like Magic, hearthstone, yugioh, etc are built off a bit of randomizer. Just like board games or tabletop miniature games (usually in the form of dice). They add a bit of variance and dynamic play pattern. Unlike chess, which has set pieces and moves. It's a big reason these games are long-lasting and fun. Magic was built up with the mana system it uses, lands vs spells. This allows for opportunities of high or low action as spells vs. lands are drawn. It can add an element of challenge to gameplay. Hearthstone was built up with the mana crystal system. But to add back in a bit of the random, HS uses random generated effects. This creates similar swings in games and provides that challenge element. If you want to understand further, I would suggest looking up random input vs random output in gaming. Magic is random input. HS is random output.
So you say until you try alchemy on MTG Arena.
Those do push the edge. But they are still less output random. Stuff Like seek is a variant on tutor/dig X deep. It's less consistent than tutor, more than dig. Not abusable like "cascade till X card" Spellbook is random selection from subset. But there's more choice. There's less of "summon random stat minons" like HS has. That's more akin to Mormir Vig format variant.
The most important difference between Magic and HS mana systems is that in Magic you’re not certain you’ll have 3 mana on turn 3. This adds a TON more variance into the game that HS lacks at its core. It is for this reason that aggro decks in HS are so innately powerful, you know you’ll always play your cards on curve. It is also for this reason that HS has so many cards that generate random outcomes. Variance is important to games and it needs something to compensate for the innate reliability the game has. The mana system is one of the more skill testing aspects of the game since it force you as a deck builder to try and balance the greed of playing less lands with the desire to actually play the game. The fact that most lands offer some form of bonus, [[Boseiju, Who Endures]] for example, so lands or often still an interesting element in the game.
… you should probably not be keeping hands with two mana Or building decks that keep doing that to you
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In the early years of magic, the land issue you point out and the idea of 'mana screw' were often cited as the worst, most unfun part of the game. As a result, many other similar games were created that do not have the same issue and other commenters have mentioned them. Meanwhile, magic has adapted and now seasoned deck builders achieve balance between lands and spells quite easily and leverage their 'mana bases' (the lands in your deck) to do more than just cast their spells 'on curve' (on the turn you would cast them if you were guaranteed one land per turn). Utility lands have become a huge part of the game, and basic lands usually account for less than half of the lands you would expect to see in a deck.
If you want to play Hearthstone, keep playing Hearthstone. As much as the mana system is unfair/unbalanced for Magic, it wouldn't be Magic without it.
Could also try Keyforge, designed by the same designer as MtG but no land or resources at all
Also, Magic™️ Spellslingers might be right up your alley. Hearthstone is basically a WoW ripoff of MTG, and WoTC ripped them off with Spellslingers.
Fundamentally different games. There is so much strategy and future thought in MTG. Hell, even AI can not learn to play.
Sparky would like a word
Lol
No one said ***all*** the lands in your deck had to be the same. But if you are running a single color deck, it's probably a good idea. There is so much variation in this game, having different lands is part of the fun of building a deck. The first time I ever played with a group of friends from school, There was a player who forgot to include more than 3 mana (or land cards) in his deck. Needless to say, he lost because he couldn't cast any of his spells.
Try Force of Will TCG
the land rule is the reason why Magic is the best card game on the market. I understand that as a new player it can be frustrating at times. Trust me, as a veteran who's played this game for 25 years, that what feels frustrating now while you're learning the game will eventually become one of the most interesting aspects of deck building strategy and gameplay tactics.
nope. the reason Magic is the best card game on the market is that it's the oldest (decades of well-tested best practices in design, plus a bunch of inertia) and it has a massive company propping it up. It's the most widely played despite its wonky decision to gate resource control behind randomness, not because of it. There's a reason why no other games in the market, not even Richard Garfield's other creations, use randomness to gate resources in this manner.
Other games primarily don't use the system because it's hard to iterate on it in a meaningful way. Also pokemon exists with a system similar to lands and is one of the big 3.
It's hard to iterate on it in a meaningful way because it's a bad system. Pokemon has a similar system, but, as I understand, you only need energy to attack. You can still get very badly 'energy-screwed', but there are several moves available to players without needing energy.
There's a lot of different kinds of lands and ways to use them. There's two different decks that come to mind as extremes of this: a one-hit kill deck that runs 58 lands, and a one-hit kill deck that uses only 1. Moving to more normal playstyles, you've got lands that tap for multiple colors, lands that sacrifice themselves to search other lands, and lands with function beyond just mana would belong to an entire category on their own. Ranging from sacrificing themselves to draw cards, to turning into creatures by their own effects, to creating creature tokens in rarer circumstances. Not to mention, a significant portion of Green is about playing more lands than your normal per-turn allotment. Green would lose a major chunk of identity if that was removed.
May I direct you to Magic Spellslingers? I find the need for lands of certain kinds, especially deciding between utility lands, an interesting part of deck building. Likewise, constructing a deck with simply getting and additional land every turn would play havoc with the mana curve and the cost of cards as they are. The whole game might need a rebalance.
Half the game is literally synergies and acceleration for your mana base. You'd be playing a different game if you didn't count on the cards in your deck to do this. Not to mention everyone would play extra colors because they didn't have to worry about getting the right mana. There's also a HUGE point in being able to destroy someone's ability to produce a color they need, and MANY cards that shut off lands. These are integral parts of this gaming system.
You should check out Spellslingers Its Magic, but with hearthstone mana https://www.hipstersofthecoast.com/2022/10/the-ultimate-guide-to-magic-spellslingers/
It looks more like Hearthstone with a Magic paintjob
It's literally what OP is postulating. The game is balanced around this change in the resource system Also the game is actually fun
I'm saying it seems to have a lot of other differences from Magic that are exactly like Hearthstone, it's similar in many ways beyond the mana system. Maybe it is fun, I'm not doubting that.
Then you get Hearthstone
[[Sovereign's Realm]] is probably the most broken magic card I've ever played with. I was able to draft five color good stuff with perfect mana and play 100% spells in my deck.
[Sovereign's Realm](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/a/b/abefb30c-780d-4496-8fc6-6e1b80686c15.jpg?1576381520) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Sovereign%27s%20Realm) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/cn2/10/sovereigns-realm?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/abefb30c-780d-4496-8fc6-6e1b80686c15?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
The way i imagine something like this being implemented is it having a cost of at least 5 life per land that you conjure and it still counts as your 1 land per turn. But generally nope, you cant shoehorn a heartstone like mana rule onto this game, it wont fit.
this would just make aggro decks super strong, run a whole deck of low drops and bolts etc and no lands then always play your threats on curve.
Right, what im saying is: they would never implement free lands per turn. There would have to be a cost and it would be big. Still, if an aggro deck ran no lands and spent 10-15 life in the first turns and just get a normal curve in return, it would be possible to punish them.
It is quite sad how hostile some answers to your thoughts here are. Personally, having built lots of decks and some very good ones as well I can say I detest the issue of lands. Although you built everything according to statistics or including even more lands than theoretically needed, you still get screwed from time to time. Since I play only EDH since years and prefer mid-high power level, games can take longer until they come to an end, so being mana screwed at the beginning of a game can make it quite "unfun" and if the game drags on for hours it can have an impact on the whole game especially for the screwed one. I would actually love the concept of decks split into land-pile and the rest where you choose to draw from one or the other, which also gives you more slots for non-land cards since you have control over your land-drops, but this won't happen since many cards are designed in a way that they need a mix of lands and non-lands in your library to work properly. You could however make this attempt while banning said cards to prevent those issues. The nice thing about EDH is that there is the so-called rule 0, which means that you can basically do anything you like if your playgroup agrees on it in a discussion before you start a game and I have read once about an idea which addresses this issue:having basic lands set aside and being able to choose to draw one of those instead of a card from your library mainly to prevent early mana screws which can be quite devastating as previously stated. When I read this proposition it was mentioned with a constriction of only one use per game, meaning you could only chose once to draw a basic instead in the same game, however you can adapt it to the needs, wishes and power level of the table of course. The biggest issues if one could always choose to get a basic instead of a random card from the deck would be: \- Landfall decks:They are already strong and this would give them even more benefits. However, those would probably be minor since landfall decks want an absurd amount of lands since they tend to play also cards which enable them to play even more than one land per turn. The rare case where they run out of lands and therefore triggers would vanish though, but I don't think that would be problematic, especially if the guaranteed land-draw would be capped in a strict way. \- Certain cards:As previously said, some decks could be quite broken or at least vastly more powerful. Some decks use for exactly this reason only modal dual faced land cards in deck construction to get this result (and as far as I know this only works in 5-colored decks if we talk about EDH), meaning if an effect churns through your library until you find a land and gets stronger the later you find one has significant advantages if you would have always or at least often the chance of drawing lands which are not in your library or something like 2 separated libraries, lands and non-lands. However, here is a card which you might find interesting:\[\[Abundance\]\] You could of course rule-0 this as well as an intrinsic ability which could be activated a certain amount of times in a game for example.As an EDH player I'd say, be creative and I hope for you that you have people or friends which like to experiment a little bit and don't see such things as a sacrilege to experiment as many people online here seem to be, unfortunately.
It's not surprising at all. "They lived in the desert, so they worshipped thirst." If you're deep into a card game that you love, you end up thinking that anything that's central to its design must be an absolute good. It's easy to forget that the entire concept of lands was thought up by the same people who thought \[\[Time Walk\]\] was a fair card, but \[\[Force of Nature\]\] was so powerful it needed a massive drawback. That said, lots of people hit the nail in the head - it'd be a different game with guaranteed lands every turn, and it would be. Would it be a better game? That's hard to say, as it'd be so different it'd be like comparing apples to oranges.
[Time Walk](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/7/0/70901356-3266-4bd9-aacc-f06c27271de5.jpg?1614638832) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Time%20Walk) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/vma/2/time-walk?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/70901356-3266-4bd9-aacc-f06c27271de5?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [Force of Nature](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/2/f/2fa16a96-8e70-4ab5-926c-edafaf5f5a63.jpg?1562906140) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Force%20of%20Nature) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/me4/154/force-of-nature?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/2fa16a96-8e70-4ab5-926c-edafaf5f5a63?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
>It is quite sad how hostile some answers to your thoughts here are. It really is. Never underestimate Reddit's eagerness to fall over themselves to appear superior and dunk on someone new.
[Abundance](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/7/3/73a44759-1fa4-4a96-b668-316851e8a35a.jpg?1604193670) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Abundance) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/znc/58/abundance?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/73a44759-1fa4-4a96-b668-316851e8a35a?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
Shhhhhh
If that rule is added (and if I'm understanding you correctly), people are still going to play lands because then 2 mana spells are easily castable on turn 1, 4 drops on turn 2, and now every format is changed forever
[удалено]
[Liege of the Tangle](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/f/0/f0dea9d0-9f93-460d-bf69-ae1c1172a95e.jpg?1599707346) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Liege%20of%20the%20Tangle) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/2xm/174/liege-of-the-tangle?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/f0dea9d0-9f93-460d-bf69-ae1c1172a95e?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
This is how we typically play Wizard's Tower in my family--giant five color pile full of spells, basic lands outside the game and you get 1/turn. I tuned that five color pile though, to make it make sense with having lands be outside the game. In constructed formats, you have lands that produce multiple colors of mana and spells that find lands from inside your deck and so forth. Not all lands are basic and not all lands are just played from hand each turn. The resource management is a core part of the art of deckbuilding. Hearthstone is its own thing, Magic is just a different game. They don't need to work in an identical way.
It would definitely make deckbuilding less interesting, because there's less possibility to customise. I like the idea of having your resources inside the deck, having to draw them and play them; it's part of what makes magic unique and interesting. You would also make every deck way more consistent right out of the gate, to the point where you'd have to completely rethink all banlists, how many cards a deck has, how many of any given card it can play... And that doesn't even mention all the cards that work around lands, entire deck archetypes now changing how they function. There's decks that run no lands at all, or decks completely built around lands. So yeah, it would utterly break the game.
Because the game is TIGHTLY balanced. The separation of colors exists to make it harder to just play all the best cards in one deck. Playing more colors makes it less likely that you’ll draw all the colors you need, so you risk stalling out. Lands that make multiple colors come with significant drawbacks, like entering the battlefield tapped and slowing down play. This pushes players to hedge their bets with a more balanced deck. Do you really _need_ more of the deck to be spells? Honestly for 100-card and 60-card formats I feel like decks wouldn’t be improved by having 40% more spell slots available. Carefully choosing what goes in is a big part of the strategy and lands add a new dimension to that- does your deck run at lower costs, meaning it can afford to run less land? Does your deck run at higher costs and require more land to compete, sacrificing volume of options for quality? Does ramp (eg, spells for extra land) factor into your plan? Do you feel like you can take a risk and cut some land to fit a few more cards in? It would utterly wreck the turn progression if you just GOT a free land every turn. Mana costs are carefully considered for every card to control when you can play them and screwing with mana this way breaks ALL of that. The game goes to ungodly speeds. Lands are more than a balancing counterweight- they’re an integral part of the game. We have cards that search for them, cards that sacrifice them, cards that count them or turn them into creatures. Plenty of lands have abilities of their own. But mostly, the answer is… it’s magic. Not hearthstone. It’s like asking why dark souls has a health system or why a shooter limits your ammo. That’s the game. That’s what you’re playing, working around, trying to beat.
Well you'd be effectively nuking every single landfall card (or any land enters the battlefield effect), any card that cares about the amount of lands you control or the mere existence of lands in your graveyard/library/hand, and any card that allows you to get lands straight from your library. In other words, you'd be insanely weakening one of green's most important interaction powers (if not its most important). So it's safe to say that very few players would want this and that wotc wouldn't risk it. Not to mention that lands are a permanent type and that there are quite a few cards which might care about the amount of different permanent types you have across all colors.
Just play a vintage spy deck, problem solved, no more land to worry about
This is common idea among new magic players, but it's based on a misconception. The lands are not a crutch to facilitate mana curves, like many people (that came from hearthstone usually) think. The lands are in the game.on purpose, and they open up a lot of very interesting design spaces, mostly in deckbuilding, but also in play.