Daily Card Redesign #67: Rupture Spire

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. 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.

Redesign:

I love land design! It's so restrictive, thus there's a need to get more creative, according that motto of Mark Rosewater's.

The thing with common land design is that when there is more than one color being produced, there is always some drawback that requires you to be paying 1 of your mana. It may come in the form of the land itself entering the battlefield tapped (you just lost a mana), or it may come in the form of paying 1 mana in some other manner. However, when it comes to common lands that can produce one mana of ANY color, there's an even greater restriction. Either you're only paying that "1 mana" and needing to endure a different restriction like only getting the mana once each time (Shimmering Grotto), or you need to pay two mana for a permanent benefit (the original Rupture Spire / Transguild Promenade).

With my route, I've decided upon the "pay 1 mana" restriction with the additional OTHER restriction. You must wait a turn for your color of any mana. This is because, flavorfully, the ground hasn't been ruptured, yet. The ground is just a barren, colorless ground (produces just colorless mana once). Then it RUPTURES! (That's when you put a rupture counter on it.) A spire emerges, and it produces one mana of any color for you!

Now, is this a Vorthos design or what?

This isn't strictly worse than the original Rupture Spire because: 1) It trades one mana for one turn's worth of waiting for colored mana (you can still produce colorless for a turn). and 2) This new version can be played on turn 1 whereas the original design cannot (without it sacrificing itself and being a moot turn 1 play).

ALTERNATE DESIGN

Evan Jones examined my original design through the lens of New World Order. I hadn't done so for this design at all. And he's right - a counter that determines colored-ness on a common isn't a good use of a set's complexity points. 

Instead, I present the above design. It's simple and clean! While it's strictly worse than my original design, it's elegant! And it may even make more sense, flavorfully, since the focus is on the Rupture Spire, which doesn't rupture the ground until later. No focus at all on the colorlessness of a non-Rupture Spire-arrived land. Thanks for inspiring me to create a better design, Evan!