This seems pretty weak, to me. Though I understand you wanted a seventh colourless land for the set this just doesn't seem exciting.

How about :Add , unless you control another city, in which case add or something like that?

@Vitenka I envisioned this card as a better Blasted Landscape. Your suggestion would definitely make this an uncommon or a rare and I think this cycle needs a common city to work in limited.

@Vitenka: Cycling lands are very powerful. Ones that cycle away for no mana even more so. I'd play this in a number of decks even if it weren't for the uncommon cycle.

This is actually pretty similar to Edge of Autumn.

@Alex Yeah, I know this one is powerful. I liked Edge of Autumn's cycling ability a lot (I thought it had good synergy with either wanting to seek mana or card advantage depending on your current board state). I hate lands that come into play tapped but I don't know what other restriction I could put on this. Maybe sacrificing two land? Sacrificing a land and X life? I'd like to see some more comments on this, but I know it's probably too powerful as is.

Mmm, fair enough. I guess once you've got enough lands it does mean not wasting a draw. It just doesn't excite me, though it does enable the rest of the cycle. I look at this and say "Ok, I could... sacrifice a land and not have drawn this. Or... I could not put it in my deck in the first place." I'd much rather play with cycle-lands that don't consume my next turns resources; though I can see that in a pinch "Ok, add blue to my pool, now sacc that hoping to this hoping to draw an answer..." is important.

Hm. I like this design quite a bit, but I agree -- the cycling ability is quite strong, whereas it might make more sense for the common colourless city to be weaker, so there's an interesting question of whether to run it in conjunction with other cities or not. It pains me to say it, but perhaps this needs one of those "occasionally useful but quite weak" abilities (possibly still cycling, but more expensively? even that might be fairly good).

@Vitenka: It's fine to say free cycling doesn't appeal to you. Just recognise that it does appeal to a lot of people, especially Spikes. (I really dislike discard effects personally myself, but I put some in my sets anyway because I'm designing for people other than myself.)

Most Spikes would play a 56-card deck in a heartbeat if they could. This isn't quite that (see also Mishra's Bauble, which didn't see as much play as people said it might), but it gives you protection from drawing it when you're mana-flooded, which is a jolly nice feature for a land to have.

@Alexander: I think it's fine to have an ETB-untapped colourless land with a good cycling ability. Just as long as it can't cycle from play. That's so crazily powerful that it needs Horizon Canopy levels of hosing.

I guess so. It just seems so divorced from the rest of the cycle. They all "Do what this does, until you've got two multiple and then they're exciting". This is "Never exciting, but hey, you can get rid of it if you like"

Seems a bit of a turnaround, is all.

Ah, I see. Yeah, that makes sense, but I think it's usual to have a more generic version of something in colourless.

Maybe I've been primed by jmgariepy's set. There the set land type is "Lair", and it appears on a common cycle that does one thing, an uncommon cycle that does a different thing, and a rare cycle that does a third thing. I didn't read "City" as automatically implying "only does anything if you control two or more Cities", but it sounds like you did.

I guess Alexander should take note of the potential for confusion or expectation-breaking, at least.

Ahh, so it's like a Temple of the False God. Nice. I'm slightly cautious of any land that can make two mana existing at common, but this might be okay in Limited.

In Constructed... people could build a deck with a manabase of all Cities. So this would be like Temple of the False God for one fewer. At a cost of drastically reducing the options in your manabase - you can't play 4 [Inkmoth Nexus and 4 Kessig Wolf Run and expect this to tap for before about turn 7. Is that enough drawback? I don't know.

@Alex Well, Temple of the False God is only uncommon and Cloudpost was common, but came into play tapped and you could start taking advantage of it by turn 3 if you got good draws. And it's only one turn better than Temple of the False God if you're playing a mana base centered around cities, which is certainly doable. But I think the restriction is going to limit the kinds of decks in which this strategy would be viable. Most of the time it's something to toss into a two or three color constructed deck that you're playing cities in and hopefully you can take advantage of it. But I think most of the time it's just going to be your third or fourth x4 city and it's definitely not going to make ripples in limited.

Would you count the fact that Vesuva exists in your calculations? If we count that card as being important, then I'd assume that

Round one: Land with City type
Round two: Land with City type
Round three: City
Round four: Vesuva

This or City, City, would be a close to 40% of the time event (assuming, say, 27 lands). Without really working for it, you'd have on turn 4. Mind you, that requires no spell-casting, doesn't leave vulnerable non-land permanents on the table, and you don't even miss playing a 1, 2 or 3 drop.

If we don't care about Vesuva, though, this is much less likely. Timespiral was a while ago, and while I think they will reprint that card in a core set someday, they haven't yet. It didn't really seem to make Cloudpost that much more broken in extended anyways, since... you know... extended can handle a lot of things. I mention it more because it occurred to me, and this is how I stop thinking about things.

This seems...

Too powerful. Maybe not in draft since the other cities are all uncommon, but this is nuts in Constructed where you can just go ahead and play this, the rare one and your dual-colored one of the appropriate colors. Hell, I'd even do it in a single colored deck since there is basically no drawback if you do the full 12 of them.

@Mandroid Yes, I'm working on something different for this colorless one.