Community

This thread is for discussion of this week's Building on a Budget, which goes live Thursday morning on magicthegathering.com.

I'm less than ecstatic. I feel like the mana fixing has gotten really good. I'm only happy that, finally, it's not completely exclusive to elite spenders.

But I am a little sad that Coastal Tower is "weak". I'm also annoyed that I feel like double red and double green costs don't make that big a difference anymore, there's so much mana fixing floating around. Maybe I'm out of touch, but it's not that difficult or risky to play double green and double blue mana costs in the same deck anymore .

I wouldn't mind, except that the designers seem to think making double red or double green costs lets them increase the power level by a whole lot (look at Lava Axe vs. Beacon of Destruction). What it really feels like it does is give all rare decks a huge edge. *sigh*.

At least it's good uncommon and common mana fixing.

Massive, massive props to Jacob for pointing out what almost everyone has been to cowardly to point out for years: that Coastal Tower is not bad and everyone's been spoiled by Hallowed Fountain and its ilk. If we absolutely must have YET ANOTHER multicolored set, this is the correct way to do it. Ravnica? Ravnica who?

Terramorphic expanse is in 10th edition, so the fetches are basically worthless until next summer. The cipt tri-color lands seem pretty cool though. It will be interesting to see if aggressive decks can actually benefit from their mana fixing though.

The fact that the fetches only go for basics make them really undesirable. I'd like to be able to fetch duals with something like that, and the simple fact that you're eating up your second turn just to find a basic when you could be dropping an early threat is disheartening. Seriously, Basics are really dying out, especially with the big 5c push of Shadowmoor, Eventide, and Alara.

The 'Lairs' seem pretty cool, definitely an improvement and definitely a good stabilizer for decks that need a splash, or decks that want better options for multicolor manabases. However, I can't imagine tons of them would be played with all the other options we have. They're SLIGHTLY better than the filter lands in the respect that if your deck naturally sits on "land, go" for the first few turns. Late game though, you'll hate them because they have the ability to timewalk you when you really need a land-drop in the mid game.

I like these previews much better than Flores' though. His card is barely mediocre.