CardName: Vein of Gold Cost: Type: Land Pow/Tgh: / Rules Text: {T}: Add {C} to your mana pool. {2}, {T}: Create a colorless Gold artifact token. (It has "Sacrifice this artifact: Add one mana of any color to your mana pool.") Flavour Text: Set/Rarity: Traveler Tales Common |
Code: CL11 History: [-] Add your comments: |
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Am I the only who thinks this is just bonkers? This soooo much better than Unknown Shores or some storage land. Abilities on lands are usually a bit overpriced anyway, but with this you get serious mana fixing (fix up to two mana at next round and so on), ramp and also an artifact to boot to work with some nifty interactions. Heck, just saccing these with something as lowsy as Etherium Astrolabe would feel pretty good.
I might be undervaluing gold. I would like a second opinion for this. This is an elegant short flavourful design with a lot of versatility, so I am biased in its favour.
The problem is this seems overpriced at as you'd be spending your fourth turn doing absolutely nothing. At two your spending your third turn to do absolutely nothing. If you don't store anything its a worse than unknown shores. and if you store once you're effectively spending three mana to turn it into a slightly better Unknown Shores during your next turn.
Storage lands usually cost 1 and a tap to get a counter, then require you to tap the land to spends its counters (using Mage-Ring Network/Crucible of the Spirit Dragon/The time spiral filter lands as a baseline. To 3 lands seems to be the rate to get mana next turn. This lets you spend the mana immediately but costs 6 to 2 counters, instead 5 mana to use 2 ; a cost which gets bigger the more counters you get (3 counters is 9/5 ; 4 is 12/7). It does give you any colour of mana instead of just 2, which I'm assuming is compensated for the more expensive build up cost.
The token production with artifacts seems to be the strongest part, but clues and serves already exist and three mana for one token doesn't seem that good.
It is however very versatile, which does make it dangerous so I would like extra opinion on this cards power level.
I find your storage land explanation pretty hard to follow. Here's how I see it:
Turn 1: Tap the storage land and another land to get a counter. mana effectively used. Turn 2: You can get the mana out of it, but then you aren't really getting anything out of it. Tap the lands again. Total of mana spent. Turn 3: You can finally tap the land to get +1 mana for this turn. That's 3 turns of building up and tapping lands five times. You can do it for longer for sure but then we're talking about a time frame of 3+ turns.
Compare to Vein of Gold: Turn 1: Tap this and two other lands. spent and you can get one mana of any color immediately. Turn 2: You have +1 mana of any color to use. That's one turn faster, fixes your mana, and uses "" less.
Also, you should think this in terms of cards like Nephalia Drownyard. You don't activate it when you can — you activate it if you really, really need to (you want to ramp into something or fix your mana), or maybe more commonly, when there's nothing else to do. And when there's nothing else to do, this is a pretty damn good thing to do.