Sinis wrote: ↑2 years ago
umtiger wrote: ↑2 years ago
Too many people complain about RL and duals when fetchlands are actually the costly lands you need to have.
Hard agree. Fetchlands give way more of an advantage than duals card for card. On a dollar basis, OG Duals aren't worth buying to improve decks in any direction.
I'll note that OG duals also have much better budget replacements than fetchlands - they can be replaced by you can replace them with shocklands with almost no loss in functionality. If you're willing to suffer a bit of loss of functionality, you can also substitute them with
tangos,
cyclers, triomes, or
snow duals. On the other hand, fetchlands have a lot fewer options for replacements - the best ones are
Fabled Passage and
Prismatic Vista, but those aren't that budget, and have a significant drop in functionality due to only fetching basics. After that, you're forced to be using even weaker options, like
Terramorphic Expanse and
Evolving Wilds.
I'll also note that basic-land-typed-cards have diminishing value in multiples - their primary use case is often to be fetched with fetchlands, or a similar effect like
Krosan Verge. After you have one or two fetchable targets, you don't need many more, since your fixing has been taken care of and you can just fetch basics in the future.
On the other hand, fetchlands tend to make you want to run more fetchlands - if you have enough of them, it becomes much more appealing to run cards like World Shaper... and if you're running a bunch of land recursion, you want more fetchlands, creating a strong feedback loop. There can be a feedback loop if you're running something like
Emeria, the Sky Ruin or
Cabal Coffers that encourages a specific land type, but the fact that you can just run more basics to enable them (plus there being significantly fewer of card with this synergy) means that the feedback loop for basic-land-typed cards is much weaker.
