PrimevalCommander wrote: ↑9 months ago
One thing that diversifies my 3 color mana bases is that I only play on-color fetches. So I only get 3 fetches in a 3 color deck. This opens up another 6 spaces for some of the lower rated duals like Check lands, Lorwyn Filter lands, Tangos, and Basics. My fixing in 3 color typically looks like this.
10 basics
3 Fetch
3 ABU Dual
3 Shock
3 Check
3 Filter
1 Triome
1 Fabled Passage
1 Command Tower
1-2 Tango lands maybe
6-8 utility lands
Budget decks drop the ABU duals and Fetches for Pain Lands and Rav Bounce Lands, maybe Bi-Cycles depending on the colors and land tutor needs.
I'm looking into the Battlebond Duals and Slow lands, but don't have many of these right now.
'Bond duals would replace Pain lands in all relevant slots if I had a bunch of them.
Bounce lands have been working their way back into several decks after taking ALL of them out some years ago. MDFC lands and
Kamigawa Channel lands have added so much extra utility to the land slots that picking up a turn 1 MDFC land to cast later is big upside. Don't sleep on these if you have some of the MDFC and Kamigawa lands along with
Bog and
Sanctuary.
Bi-Cycles have been really low for me. I think I only have 1 deck playing them now. Since my standard basic count for 3 color decks is 10, I usually meet the Tango's untapped clause maybe 75% of the time. Where Bi-Cycles enter tapped 100% of the time and I can probably count on 1 hand the number of times I have cycled one. My loam deck is also mono-green so now help there.
Green is my favorite color, so I will always be on the lookout for lands that are forests and lands that fetch forests.
Same here, except I run painlands in-lieu of the ABU duals (budget, also ABU can't be foiled) as you said. I don't run
Fabled Passage (even if it is reasonably priced nowadays) because I sort of mentally group it with the "5C club" (e.g.
Reflecting Pool.
Prismatic Vista) that I sort of deliberately omit so to reduce similarity among my decks. But then again I run
Path of Ancestry in all my 3C decks (but not my 5C) since it's basically a better triland (and while I should drop those, I actually still run them because I just like their flavor diversity across the decks).
I personally still don't trust bouncelands, even with the advent of the MDFCs and Channel lands. The thought of losing that much tempo and risking removal still irks me even if the utility potential has risen. My tri-colored decks are already loaded to the point I don't consider either of those utilities to begin with anyway (and I like to keep my Basic count around 12). MDFCs only go to my 2-colored decks (where I do run bounce mostly because there's only so many duals and one bounceland is an acceptable risk) and my Channel lands either go to mono-colored (and the mono-colored bounces have no foils) or my 5C lands deck, where I already accounted for other means for sacrifice/recursion and I don't think I can afford even more tempo loss over there.
As for Bondlands vs Painlands, it presents a case similar to Checklands vs Painlands, mostly because strictly speaking in a vacuum, unconditional lands (Painlands, Horizon Lands) are technically better than conditional lands like Bondlands/Checklands. But in a 3C deck, even a single shockland enables all checklands, and it escalates further when you add Fetches and ABUs on top of that, which is why I primarily rank Checklands above unconditional lands as long as you have shocklands in the deck. Sure, you can in theory brick early game, but seriously with mulligans what are the practical chances (and that's with Filters adding more bricking chances)?
Bondlands are trickier. My initial assessment over a year ago was pretty low, because pre-pandemic there were 1v1 games (and my memories were imprinted with that), but with the influx of new players in the recent year, 1v1 has virtually gone extinct where I am, at least. Add on that I often play powered games, so the chances of games ending without going into 1v1 is more likely than not.
But despite that, the games that do go into 1v1 are often tighter and try to wring out as much mana/tempo even in late-game, and guess when Bondlands backfire, if they do? Yes, strictly speaking it's going to happen on a similar rate as Checklands bricking at the start, but to lose because a land bricked conditionally later in the game would probably be much more sour. Ironic coming from someone playing
Frontier Bivouac still, but at least with that I knew I bricked myself regardless of condition anyway.
So my opinion on them did rise a bit, but I'm not entirely convinced that it's a windmill replacement over Painlands (also in the chaos people tend to look at life totals as a whole to make decisions without delving into how the life was lost, so it can sometimes turn early decisions in your favor, ironically).
