­Rampant Growth variant. According to Maro black is second to green in fetching lands (as long as swamps).

It's second in fetching lands to hand, perhaps. I would have put white as second in fetching them to the battlefield, though limited to Plains just as black is limited to swamps.

IMO that's closer to Nature's Lore rather than Rampant Growth (the mix of the two).

Anyway, noooo. This is not cool.

One perhaps a bit more acceptable variant I had was:

> ~
> Instant/Sorcery? (C)
> As an additional cost to cast ~, sacrifice a creature.
> Search your library for a Swamp card and put that card onto the battlefield tapped. Then shuffle your library.

I still don't think it's that ideal, but at the very least it has a customary drawback which black effects are associated with. Plus the flavor makes sense since Swamps are made up of "dead matter". Also reminiscent of Blood Pet in a way.

Can you please elaborate on why isn't card is "Not Cool"?

Every colour gets two mana mana rocks. This does not undercut black weakness.

If a secondary colour get ramp, it would be black according to Maro. Which it would do via swamps to make you commit further to black.

And according to Mark Rosewater, black is the secondary colour he'd put rampant growth in if green is unavailable. Which would be swamps and not basics lands. And Wizards has considered giving black something far more powerful. And black is already allowed to search for swamps, put them into play, and make them produce mana.

I view this as a great Planar Chaos card, since it does something that's in black colour pie but isn't used because of current design reason, all without undercutting blacks weakness.

And yes, the spell you've proposed is a great flavourful card. But it belongs in a regular set, not a Planar Chaos set.

I'm not making an argument for or against black Nature's Lore. I just thought it was worth pointing out that "every color gets a two mana rock" is an arguable sentiment. Certainly they did in the past. I don't know if Wizards would print Charcoal Diamond right now, though. Maybe they would, but I don't think it's a given.

> Every colour gets two mana mana rocks. This does not undercut black weakness.

IMO these are pretty bad arguments since 1) Can every color now get a Nature's Lore? and 2) Does this mean that black can use all evergreen keywords since none of them undercut its weaknesses?

... but okay, so. It really comes down the flavor IMO. Black has very clear paradigms through which it views reality.

individualism -> self-preservation -> parasitism (entropy) -> paranoia -> betrayal (drain effects like lifelink, sac costs, disemtomb, gain indestructible UEOT, etc)

power plays / amorality -> increasing potency / maximizing resource usage -> defilement / greed (reanimation, saccing again, trading life for resources, etc)

Both of those play well into destruction/withering and discard effects as well.

This increasing potency and maximizing resource usage is where the "Your Swamps now produce more" comes from I think. I still doubt it heavily that black would ever get an enchantment with that effect.

So anyway, given those I just don't see how spending your turn to ramp for a land fits in there.

From MTG Salvation:

> Black and Green: In Green, Black sees a color that is naive to the basics of life; that the world is an ugly place and that letting life happen unhindered only leads to more and more problems. The main debate between Black and Green is Parasitism (Death) vs. Interdependency (Life). Black believes that the weak masses exist only to be exploited by the strong (and will use death as a tool to cull the weak). Green's belief in the masses being essential to maintaining synergy through nature makes no sense to Black.

To me, this describes well the scenario of "Green grows lands and then Black destroys those lands". Also, I would say that ramping passively just isn't in black's style - all that describes green perfectly: "nature finds a way" and such.

As for MaRo, four year old replies stating "I guess I'd choose black" and "It's a distant second but if asked" aren't exactly convincing.

I'm glad it was acknowledged that Liliana of the Dark Realms was a mistake. That +1 doesn't feel back at all. So it's likely that Liliana's Shade also falls under that.

Also, notice that the statement of saying that Liliana was a mistake came in 2015, while in 2013 he just said:

> Black can and has been allowed to get extra black mana out of swamps for a long time. Liliana just did it back in Magic 2013.

So I would say that's a shift in philosophy that has happened between those years. Probably similar to those "Deals 13 damage to creature" cards in red that prompted "Destroy target creature" designs in red since "isn't 13 damage pretty much just removal" and caused MaRo to realize the mistake done there.

­Korlash, Heir to Blackblade is the only instance in which black has ramped for Swamps and it's quite a curious one. It certainly seems that for a time MaRo had planned or decided that black can tutor/ramp for Swamps. Perhaps Liliana of the Dark Realms was that idea realized, but it also seems to have made him realize that "it just doesn't fit" (into play style or flavor).

So, to summarize: Not cool, man. Not cool.

It plays into the flavour of black tempts you into playing more black, the same the Tainted Lands do. Black is allowed to tutor swamps and while you can get ramp/dual lands, you need to have a heavily black manabase. Black is colour most tied to basic land type (besides green), with its swamp mattering counting as a subtheme of "black tempts you into playing more black". Black can access more mana from swamps (2015).

Getting an enchantment that doubles swamps was still fine in 2015, and is very likely to still be in black's colour pie unless somethinghas changed.

It was making "Lilliana" that planeswalker who got Swamps that was a mistake. However a Planeswalker that get swamps makes sense for black, not Lilians character (2015). The card's actual mechanics (2015) are fine, it's only making the character Liliana that was considered a mistake.

Which in turn means that Lilianans Shade wasn't a mistake...

Black is tertiary in permanent mana production in the mechanical colour pie, which is actually significant since it and green are the only colours with access to permanent mana production. (Blue doesn't get access to mana production).

And while it was 2013, (a black arbor elf was 'close'. So yes, permanent mana acceleration was in black colour pie then.

My argument is that is card is mechanically black, if tertiary. There was no 2013 colour pie change. And that rather than black losing ramp, green got nerfed causing black to be nerfed in turn. We live in a world where Rampant Growth is to strong for standard. And mechanically, if 2 cmc 'tapped' mana rocks are still okay, Hedron Crawler, then yes, every colour could get access to Nature's Lore provide it etbs tapped and fetches their respective basic land type, which you needed to cast the spell in the first place. (Would work best in black/green/red as they most heavily reward you for playing their land type, less well in blue/white but acceptable due to colourless ramp (blue) and white's plainfetching.)

I've been thinking about this for couple of days now and I have to say that I just don't "see it."

If anything I would rather have rituals see a small return to black since they at least kind of play into it flavorfully. Black can do burst of mana certainly it tries to evoke some kind of ritual, but creating stability isn't it (Midnight Oil).

Ramping for lands to me describes abundance and overflowing life. It's certainly something black wants (flavorfully and mechanically, more on that later). Black grasps at life with utter greed, but isn't able to produce it per se - it mostly stoops into stealing it parasitically. Green excels in this passive activity since it's "without ego" and "serene" and all that. Black pretty much IS the ego.

Personally, mono-black control is close to my heart, and one thing I can tell you that one of the dangers of that deck is not hitting your lands. Not being able to remove artifacts or enchantments is a minor nuisance compared to that. Especially in EDH, I fear that black ramp spells would push the color too far. Like, if I'm constructing a black control deck, and I would consider adding green to it, to me, the most reasonable reason to do so would be to ramp (obviously individual cards play into this, but here I'm just referring colors to as abstract collections of mechanics).

As for tutoring the color's own basic lands to hand, I would expand the tithe effects of white to do that since it has that "slow and steady" feeling of building a community. Also, a phrase like "Endless Plains" keeps popping up in my mind.

Some of those blogatog links are quite funny at times - you're referencing to them as though they were out of some scientific research with statistics and stuff.

For example:

> * mcpowless-chang asked: Is a two mana land ramp spell (rampant growth) too good for standard?

> * MaRo: Not a developer but maybe.

And what you take out of that is that "We live in a world where Rampant Growth is too strong for standard". That's hilarious!

But yes, it seems that MaRo at least doesn't consider Liliana irksome though I had hoped I could have agreed on that with him.

Also, I think having ramp spells in all colors would just be dumb. This is one of the multitude of reasons why I think many of the artifacts push the color pie waaayyy too much.

As a disclaimer, it might be worth of note that I also would not have drawbackless tutors in black either, so perhaps I'm not really the person you want to convince?

For whatever reason I have always found black to be the easiest color to design cards for.

Anyway, maybe other people have something more sensible to say. I'm not honestly very good at expressing myself verbally, that is, trying to explain what I'm "understanding" (too much of the procession is happening at intuitive levels).

Hopefully it isn't too irritating that I'm pairing color pie with flavor, but from to me, the flavor is why the color pie and the game itself exists. Obviously you can "justify everything" with flavor, but not all those "flavor justifications" are created equal - or those same cards could still be expressed with the current color pie and so on.

Like here, with a name like "Fester the Blight" I would expect some kind of constant life loss, or buff from creatures dying or something. Swamps themselves don't feel that nasty to me. They're functional quite identical to the other basic lands.

For what it's worth, I've thought two mana land ramp was too good for a while now. It lets control decks skip to later stages of the game, instead of forcing them to play out round three with three mana. Makes control decks repetitive, and reduces the variety of cards control needs to play. That said, players expect mana acceleration as a strategy, and would be miffed if they couldn't skip parts of the game. I wonder if MaRo has my same beef.