This has been a long time coming (though not as long as some other pieces I have in the pipeline). Let’s talk about Gates (Baby).
It all started 10 years ago. One of the fancy improvements to the new card frame was this little feature:
Why “Basic Land – Forest?”
We added “Basic” in order to help new players understand the difference between basic and nonbasic lands. By explaining this distinction on the type line, we did not feel the need to add reminder text to cards like Blood Moon that reference “nonbasic lands.”We added “Forest” to the forests for two reasons. It allows us to make cards like the Dragon Lairs from Planeshift be “Land – Lair,” and then they need one fewer sentence in their text boxes. This also opens up design space for future cards. In addition, this change allows us to clean up an obscure rule that most of you won’t care about. (For the technically minded: the current rules say that every land has a subtype equal to its name. We needed that rule so that cards like Wood Elves don’t have to say “card named Forest,” but that rule has prevented us from making some cards we wanted to make, plus it’s kind of a silly rule to have anyway – if the cards have subtypes, we should just print them on the cards instead of having them be invisible subtypes. Then we can get rid of that rule because all lands will just have whatever subtypes are printed on them.)
Yes, the “new” frames are turning 10 this year and will have been in Magic the same amount of time as the old frames. But back to the point at hand. Because lands were now free to have a subtype, there were crazy things that you could do with them. It opened up so much design space and when I first read this I was like, “awesome.” Since 8th Edition we have seen the following land subtypes:
- Eighth Edition – Urza’s Mine, Urza’s Power-Plant, Urza’s Tower
- Mirrodin – Locus
- Ninth Edition – Urza’s Mine, Urza’s Power-Plant, Urza’s Tower
- Time Spiral – Desert, Urza’s
- Scars of Mirrodin – Locus
- Return to Ravnica – Gate
Yeah, huge innovation here. The Urza’s Lands helped with templating, Locus have been on two lands (but both benefit from multiples in play), and Desert is just a Desert to help with powerhouse Camel‘s ability. The Locus subtype is actually pretty powerful so it’s not like it can be really used again and Urza’s Factory is put there because of flavor.
So why hasn’t land subtypes been used more? Continue reading “Good Gates Make Good Neighbors”
However, this coming block looks like this: 
Both Return to Ravnica and Gatecrash are large sets, so the drafting experience goes like this: 
And what we have here is the biggest and most ambitious set and block design that WotC has ever attempted exceeding the most “complex” block ever: Time Spiral. And how did we get here? Let’s take a history lesson. 
MTG Color Pie 