The Phantom Lands
Some time ago, Jumpstart gave pauper cubers a brand new land cycle to play with and they seemed pretty good. Resembling a possibly better version of the Vivid lands, which had yet to ever be printed at common, the Thriving lands were a welcome addition to pauper's less than ideal fixing land pool. They're just an innocent cycle of lands to help decks build their own guildgate... right?
My own pauper environment can be found here and is a relatively small cube where 2-4 players draft 180 of the 240 cards and get 45 picks each.
I have found, due to the nature of drafting with few people, you generally have more than an abundance of playables by the end of the draft. Because of this lands become incredibly high picks with little risk associated with them as you'll never be short on high quality playables and you'll more or less never see a monocolored deck. However, pushing out monocolored decks for 2 or even more often 3-color decks is not something I'm particularly worried about with this cube, after all a small environment can't support every macro archetype of Magic like a 540 card environment can.
Revenge of the Goodstuff
Here's where the problem comes in. In my last couple drafts of my cube I've decided to try and just force the infamous 5-color goodstuff deck and while I suspected the deck may be a problem due to the amount of lands I run, I was not expecting how incredibly easy it was to cast my spells every single time during the games. The truth is, while I run Ash Barrens, Evolving Wilds, and Terramorphic Expanse, I wasn't running 3 rainbow lands I was running 8!
The Thriving lands, in truth, can simply act as another Evolving Wilds and do not even need to be played in a deck containing their signature color. In a multicolored deck they are often better than Evolving Wilds since not only do they get you whatever color you currently need in that moment, but you can tap them for their signature color when you need it later. The quality of fixing I was playing with was through the roof and I didn't even need to be base green.
A New Manabase
All in all I have decided the 5-color deck is too good and too open for the environment I want. The disadvantage of playing below curve with almost all your lands coming in tapped simply isn't enough without the shaky unreliable mana base a 5-color deck should have. I'll be saying goodbye to the Thriving Lands and won't be replacing them as I also want to see how 35 lands play instead of 40. I will, however, be replacing one of my colorless lands with a less deceptive rainbow land in the Thriving style, Shimmerdrift Vale.
Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoyed the post! I do plan to do more posts beyond the simple set reviews so be sure to check back from time to time.
