Eh, you'd design your deck around low-mana-cost cards, figuring that most of it had to work with 2-3 lands and the higher-casting-cost cards had to be used sparingly.
One of my favorite decks was an all-common blue/red control deck with 28 land, made so that I could bring it into school and not worry about it getting stolen. It was maddening to play against - I'd be like "Okay, I'll flood 3 of your creatures, block your knight with my clay statue, and counterspell your disenchant." Typically games would run 40 turns with nobody doing any damage, and then all of a sudden I'd be like "...and I'll Lava Burst you for 20. Game over." Or the Storm Shaman would come out around turn 10, by that time it's 5/4 and I've got enough mana to counterspell any attempts to remove it, and the game is over in 4 turns. Land can be devastatingly effective with cards made to take advantage of it.
> Land can be devastatingly effective with cards made to take advantage of it.
One of my favorite decks is loosely based on a 5-color preconstructed deck from the Apocalypse era - it's basically almost all mana fixing, with a few cards that take advantage of multiple colors, and then four "Life/Death"s[1]
All that time you spent doing nothing but playing land-generating spells suddenly pays off when you can attack with twenty 1/1 creatures in a single turn, then declare them unblockable[2] and rinse and repeat the next turn[3].
It's even better because land-destruction spells are much rarer (and more costly), so you're impervious to Wrath-of-God[4]-eque spells.
Comments
Eh, you'd design your deck around low-mana-cost cards, figuring that most of it had to work with 2-3 lands and the higher-casting-cost cards had to be used sparingly.
One of my favorite decks was an all-common blue/red control deck with 28 land, made so that I could bring it into school and not worry about it getting stolen. It was maddening to play against - I'd be like "Okay, I'll flood 3 of your creatures, block your knight with my clay statue, and counterspell your disenchant." Typically games would run 40 turns with nobody doing any damage, and then all of a sudden I'd be like "...and I'll Lava Burst you for 20. Game over." Or the Storm Shaman would come out around turn 10, by that time it's 5/4 and I've got enough mana to counterspell any attempts to remove it, and the game is over in 4 turns. Land can be devastatingly effective with cards made to take advantage of it.
> Land can be devastatingly effective with cards made to take advantage of it.
One of my favorite decks is loosely based on a 5-color preconstructed deck from the Apocalypse era - it's basically almost all mana fixing, with a few cards that take advantage of multiple colors, and then four "Life/Death"s[1]
All that time you spent doing nothing but playing land-generating spells suddenly pays off when you can attack with twenty 1/1 creatures in a single turn, then declare them unblockable[2] and rinse and repeat the next turn[3].
It's even better because land-destruction spells are much rarer (and more costly), so you're impervious to Wrath-of-God[4]-eque spells.
[1]http://gatherer.wizards.com/pages/card/Details.aspx?multiver...
[2]http://gatherer.wizards.com/pages/card/Details.aspx?multiver...
[3] If, by some miracle, they had enough life to survive, that is.
[4] http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiver...