Daily Card Redesign #38: Invasion Dual Lands

Daily Card Redesign is a daily Magic: The Gathering design exercise where I randomly choose a card for the scenario of it being killed late during its own set's development, and I design a replacement card that uses the same art, is the same color, is the same rarity, and has a name that, alphabetically, keeps it within the same collector number for the set.

Sweet! ...And crap. Dual land design is tough since there's not a lot of design space there. Well, here goes:

Redesign:

When studying nonbasic lands, I discovered there's two common drawbacks used to offset the fact that you can make more than one color of mana. The most common is having the land enter the battlefield tapped. This is what this cycle originally did. However, they were designed in a way that makes it so that all future dual lands with the same drawback will be strictly better than them.

In modern Magic: The Gathering design of dual lands that enter the battlefield tapped, there's always a tiny bit of a bonus to go alongside the drawback. It may be a Gate in the case of Return to Ravnica block. The land may gain you 1 life upon entering the battlefield. Or maybe it can make you a third color like in Shards of Alara (the best example of how strictly worse this cycle of lands is). This is because the drawback of entering the battlefield tapped is harsh when compared to rare dual lands.

The difference between uncommon dual lands and rare dual lands is that rare dual lands are the only ones that can possibly enter the battlefield untapped OR not be a land that requires a mana investment. The possibility of being able to play with dual lands uninhibited by a drawback is seen in the other common drawback used that is reserved only for rare lands: a condition to prevent a drawback.

The Scars of Mirrodin dual lands have a condition that check to see how few lands you have. Lorwyn featured lands that wanted you to have a creature card of a specific type in your hand. Ravnica and Return to Ravnica's shock lands want you to pay 2 life.

For this cycle, since they're uncommons, they HAVE to require at least a single mana investment - which is usually being the land itself entering the battlefield itself. Other cases are the Panorama cycle from Shards of Alara.

I wanted to give this cycle a tiny bonus like all the other uncommon dual lands do, so I decided on the above. The tiny bonus comes in the form of allowing you to choose which land is being tapped for the drawback, rather than just the land itself. This can make a difference when you're starved for a blue mana and would rather one of your Plains tap instead of your Coastal Tower.