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I've just seen the new spoilers from Wizards on Facebook.

The Return to Ravnica card "Hallowed Foutain" is presumably part of a cycle, and to me this says MTG still likes powerful duel lands as well as the slower pace of duel lands that must enter play tapped. The card has 4.5 starts on Gatherer, this is very high. RTR seems popular, and in the interests of fairness I hope a lot of these get printed, whats more they will now be Standard for a while.

gatherer.wizards.com/pages/card/Details....
The RTR card does not appear exactly as the linked one. It has been slightly reworded, "comes into play" is now "enters the battlefield", "instead" is gone, the card has new art and now has flavor text.

I'm reasonably new, so sorry if I have any of this wrong, but it seems that the cards:

Taps for either mana type.

For the cheap cost of 2 life, dosn't need to enter the battlefield tapped.

And has relevent sub-types, being those of the respective lands for both mana types, this makes it great for some cards that would otherwise search only for basic lands or that otherwise interact with land of specific subtypes.

If you check the Oracle text for Hallowed Fountain , you will find the changes in text simply bring the card up to date with current rules templating. (For example, all cards that used to say "comes into play" now officially say "enters the battlefield".)

And yes, it is part of a cycle. All of the Shock Lands from the original Ravnica block are apparently being reprinted.

And you are correct that the cards have relevant sub-types and tap for mana of either color. These cards are the absolute closest I expect us to ever have to the original Dual Lands .

Thanks.

They seem a bit too powerful, I guess standard rotates to allow bits of poweful like this without being overly powered all over.

hmm, electric mountain, voltaic lake, positivly charged plains.

They're really not that powerful without cheap effective ways to get them in play.  The drawback of paying 2 life for it to be untapped is pretty major.  If you look at all the deck lists that play them (so Modern decks), most of them are only played as a 2-ofs at most simply because it's too much damage if you draw them naturally.

By themselves, the shock lands aren't that powerful.  What makes them powerful is the ability to play 3+ colors in a single deck, giving you access to all the best cards in the format.

Sep 4, 2012 -- 8:49AM, MadAdmiral wrote:

They're really not that powerful without cheap effective ways to get them in play.  The drawback of paying 2 life for it to be untapped is pretty major.  If you look at all the deck lists that play them (so Modern decks), most of them are only played as a 2-ofs at most simply because it's too much damage if you draw them naturally.

By themselves, the shock lands aren't that powerful.  What makes them powerful is the ability to play 3+ colors in a single deck, giving you access to all the best cards in the format.

Well, they play them as 2 ofs with a ton of fetch lands and in a bunch of different colors. 

Shocklands are great, and there is a good reason why they are staples for Modern and Eternal formats, but they are not as powerful as you think.  Two life is quite cheap, however when multiple are played (as you might want to do to make a 3-4 color deck) that life loss can add up fast.  This is exacerbated by the fact that in non-rotating formats you will be playing them with Fetchlands like Arid Mesa to make sure you have the mana you need when you need it.  If you are always fetching them and putting them in to play un-tapped you are repeatedly Bolting yourself, and that can be bad.

You will want to get your hands on as many as you can so you can have as many tools as possible to make decks with, but in a competitive Modern deck it is rare to see more than four total in a single mana-base.  Standard may require more per deck due to not having fetchlands, but that probably still only means six or so.

you can easily run more shocklands

early game you don't mind the 2 life, late game you don't mind it entering tapped

I can see decks in Standard running more than 6, but not right away.  Wait until all 10 have been printed and there will 3 color decks running 8-9 of them (2-3 per color combination).

And don't say that they're used in "Eternal" formats.  They're only used in Modern.  Real Legacy and Vintage decks wouldn't get anywhere near the Shocks.

Sep 4, 2012 -- 8:49AM, MadAdmiral wrote:

They're really not that powerful without cheap effective ways to get them in play.  The drawback of paying 2 life for it to be untapped is pretty major.

Wait, what? I personally like modal drawbacks. And most players liked painlands before shocklands made their debut.

Sep 4, 2012 -- 10:55AM, Enigma256 wrote:

you can easily run more shocklands

early game you don't mind the 2 life, late game you don't mind it entering tapped

Sure you can run more, but at least in Modern you rarely see more than 4 in the top tier decks due to fetchlands.  I have not gone back and looked at orginal Rav standards, but I would suspect that very few top decks had more than 6, though clearly I could be wrong.