Community

Looks like the speculation was spot-on. I'm looking forward to this article.

Is the title supposed to allude to "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?"? :P

The argument is that Barry's Land, the sixth Basic, would play well in a domain deck, but previous discussion has always been that the land would screw with the game were it added to the game as a whole. The solution, which I'm sure they are trying, is that it's a one-time thing, turns Domain UP, and produces colorless mana. It's also likely an uncommon (to fit the hole it's loss was made), and I think that would be just fine. it should only work as a narrow Domain-helper and otherwise useless to the game. I think the way it played, rather than any rules issues involved otherwise, was the influencing factor.

Barry's Land
Basic Land
{Tap}: Add {1} to your mana pool.

Such a card is pretty simple. It doesn't play well with multicolor, however, when every card you play wants to produce color, sometimes two different kinds of it or more. However, such a card works well with the rest of the set that's designed to get mana fixing without producing enormous quantities. so I think such a card might work in Alara Reborn (the "Wedge" set?). This also reduces its influence to the rest of the Block by 6 months, instead of in the beginning, and therefore reduces its influence to Domain matters. Despite that, such a land would NOT interfere with Domain Zoo, since they'd never play a colorless-producing land.

Qilong wrote:

The argument is that Barry's Land, the sixth Basic, would play well in a domain deck, but previous discussion has always been that the land would screw with the game were it added to the game as a whole. The solution, which I'm sure they are trying, is that it's a one-time thing, turns Domain UP, and produces colorless mana. It's also likely an uncommon (to fit the hole it's loss was made), and I think that would be just fine. it should only work as a narrow Domain-helper and otherwise useless to the game. I think the way it played, rather than any rules issues involved otherwise, was the influencing factor.

I agree. If it were killed for rules reasons, The Great MaGo would be explaining why. MaRo said in a previous article that he stays away from templating whenever possible.

Barry's Land
Basic Land
{Tap}: Add {1} to your mana pool.

Being a basic land doesn't matter (Sacred Foundry et al. work with Domain). It would just have to be a land (basic or nonbasic) with a new land type that would be added as a basic land type in the rules.

Such a card is pretty simple. It doesn't play well with multicolor, however, when every card you play wants to produce color, sometimes two different kinds of it or more. However, such a card works well with the rest of the set that's designed to get mana fixing without producing enormous quantities. so I think such a card might work in Alara Reborn (the "Wedge" set?). This also reduces its influence to the rest of the Block by 6 months, instead of in the beginning, and therefore reduces its influence to Domain matters. Despite that, such a land would NOT interfere with Domain Zoo, since they'd never play a colorless-producing land.

My guess is that's exactly why it was killed. Domain decks by definition have access to all colors of mana, so they want to play the best spells of every color, so they don't want to play Barry's Land. Perhaps it could have been redesigned as a land that produced colored mana with a drawback, but that would make it less elegant and might require it to be a cycle.

Also, Barry's Land would suffer from the Arcane problem, in that its only purpose would be to interact with domain cards, which don't appear in most sets.

milo bloom wrote:

Now I'm concerned. Today's LD article mentioned a land that got cut and was replaced by Reliquary Tower, and it said Maro would discuss the land in Monday's column. It's way too early for Alara Reborn previews, so I've got a bad feeling they've borked Barry's Land.

Don't count on it. They knew that were they to bork Barry's Land they would incur the wrath of the design connisseurs. And hell hath no fury like a design conniseur scorned.