Hello and welcome back to Magic Project: Omega!

Sorry for being late with today’s post, real life does what it does best. In any case we are going to be talking about a Rare land cycle!

Now ABU introduced some of the strongest lands in Magic’s history with the original Dual Lands, untapped dual lands with land types. This made them incredibly sought after cards because they are unrestricted access to two colors of mana from untapped lands that can be used with Fetchlands.

They are amazing lands, and even though people do want these lands back in Magic, we aren’t getting them any time soon. So in order to pay homage to them, I had to make some pretty good lands.

Design Approach

When looking at the original Dual Lands we have to take into account that what made them so good is that they have the land types and come in untapped, which was fine in older Magic when Fetchlands didn’t exist.

Making a strong set that pays homage to ABU with current design sensibilities made making the Rare land cycle for this set interesting.

For sure I wanted to have the lands have land types, that was certain, but I did want to put a bit of a limiter for them to make sure that they weren’t too strong for the set.

While I didn’t take The Reserved List into much consideration for the rest of the set, I did have it in mind while making these lands. This helped put in a restriction that would potentially make the original Dual Lands “technically” legal to print in a new set.

I also added a conditional enters tapped condition, which I could very well do away with in future updates, but the reason why I ended up putting it in was as a bit of a safety valve for making these lands too strong.

Because not only did I give this cycle land types, but I also gave them all two mana and tap activated abilities that would make them all good in a general sense, but also help a bit with the archetypes of the set.

Cards

Here are the cards I ended up with!

Let’s talk about what they all have in common first.

They all have the two land types, as I said earlier. They all also happen to be Legendary lands, which is a common way people say we can reprint the original Dual Lands as a way to get over The Reserved List.

I also happened to use that as a restriction for this as a draft set, by having them all enter tapped unless you control another legendary permanent. This is a nice limiter to have since it will keep the games at a decent parity, even if people draft two of these.

There are also the abilities of each land, each of which cost one mana of each color they can produce as well as tapping the land. I feel confident in most of these effects, but there may be some tweaks to be made in the future.

Frozen Temple is the one I feel the least confident in, because while it does have a great side in a counter spell, the life gain seems incidental and could be changed to card draw. Deep Sea Trench is a pretty solid land for a mill based deck that will help in the blue black Control archetype, especially since there is a chance that the effect can repeat once.

Ruinlands originally had a worse version of the effect where I had the player sacrifice a card and if it was power 4 or greater draw a card, but I think that having an Edict effect that gets rid of the highest mana value creature an opponent controls is stronger overall.

Vast Highlands being an Overrun effect is pretty strong, and while I think it is fine as it is, I may change it to a set number if I feel that it needs to be toned down. Pridelands being able to give two of your creatures +1/+1 counters and then proliferating is pretty nice and plays well with the +1/+1 Counters archetype in white and green.

Desecrated Field being able to discard a card and losing life is pretty good, though I may add life gain to help give it a bit more of an impact. Volcanic Vents being a three mana Lightning Bolt is pretty solid, though there may be a version where I have it do 4 damage instead of 3 in the future.

Marshland milling you some cards and putting a permanent back in your hand served to help the Graveyard archetype, which is fine but I think I could make it two permanents to make it a bit more effective.

Grand Spires being a buff for your attacking creatures made sense to me, and if anything I may tweak the numbers to make give it one more power or add a toughness boost. Isolated Paradise being able to copy any spell can go either way in being very strong or very weak, it needs some testing to see if I need to change it completely or do some slight tweaking.

I am fairly confident in these cards, though I do think some slight tweaks in the future may be necessary, but that comes with a bit of testing.

When we next return to Magic Project: Omega, we are going to be going back to cards we made previously and tweaking them, because as I go on in making the set, there are some definite improvements that can be made.

Until then, see you all next time!

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual

Bluesky: @jmcasualnerd.bsky.social

Ko-Fi: ko-fi.com/jmcasual