This land is your land
September 15th 2008 04:28
Adarkar Wastes is, like the other nine similar cards in the Tenth Edition (one for every possible two-color combination), one of the best Magic cards ever printed, though you wouldn’t guess it to hear it discussed in some places out there. Some tournament players insist it isn’t powerful enough for their fragile little sensibilities, in spite of the fact that it powers pro-event-winning decks to this day with nary a complaint from their pilots. Some observers proclaim their “boredom” after its long run in five of the last six core sets, despite the fact that more print runs means that more casual players have a chance to play with them, an issue that some of those same observers express concern about. As such, there are a few people who seem unusually eager to proclaim that its time is over whenever a similar card appears in a new expansion.
A lot of people at MTG Salvation prefer this one, probably because it’s expensive and they already own four of them and they like lording it over anyone who doesn’t.
The best reason why Adarkar Wastes has to go, and by “best” I mean “the one that makes least sense,” is that it originally comes from the Ice Age set, and its name refers to a place that only existed during Dominaria’s Ice Age. This is supposed to make it somehow less accessible to new players… despite the fact that Hallowed Fountain’s art depicts a place that only exists in the implausible ecumenopolis of Ravnica.
In some games, this problem would keep the Wastes out of the core edition permanently. For instance, many things in the basic Dungeons and Dragons manuals are non-specific because they have to form the basis of campaigns in Faerun, Eberron, Krynn, and Ravenloft alike. There need to be a few generic creatures, spells, and flavor elements to keep players from losing their way, because planar crossovers are not terribly common and tend to be smaller in scale when they do happen – a wizard makes a pact with a demon, or a small group of travelers visits Sigil, the City of Doors.
By contrast, the Magic website’s new front page proclaims “You Are a Planeswalker!” and encourages you to mix and match settings for maximum deck power, even ones with clashing art styles like Ravnica and Tempest, or Ravnica and Champions of Kamigawa, or Ravnica and just about anything else. The core set in particular is about Magic’s history, and as such is not only allowed but deliberately designed to contain cards from many different places, in particular ones that actively show off their homeworld’s look and attitude.
Five elegant cards, five different worlds.
Ravnica’s rare lands, however, were deliberately given names that did not refer to unique places – but not for the reason their partisans believe. A card with a name or art that could go in any old part of the multiverse is, if anything, less suitable to be in a core set than one whose name is mostly made up of proper nouns. This isn’t to say that Hallowed Fountain and its partners in crime will certainly never be reprinted; but if they are, it will be in a new expansion where the fact that their name doesn’t tie them to a specific place won’t actually be a disadvantage.
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