saturation duals

[folding_music]

Is this worded right? You can spellsling with this but you can't:

- play colorless spells
- play activated abilities, taxes or extra costs from triggered sources (eg. Akoum Firebird)
- play three-colour spells which contain but exceed these colors (eg. Korvold, Fae-Cursed King lol)

and, mmmm, is it still too strong?

[user_938036]

These restrictions are more deck building restrictions rather than power level restrictions and its not even significant. In the deck that wants this its identical to an original dual land. So yah, too strong.

[spacemonaut]

That wording seems effective for your goals. We could reword it slightly to fit templating conventions better: MTG usually uses phrases like "spend this mana only to..." for permissions/restrictions, and talks about mana being spent for after-the-fact responses to how you spent your mana.

This means the template might be more like this:

Spend mana produced by Ashlands to cast only spells that are black and/or red and no other color.

(I dug around a bit: Secret Base, Cultivator Drone, and Niko Defies Destiny suggest we use "that" instead of "which"; wo cards use "which.")

I agree with @user_938036 though. In a deck that's primarily oriented towards casting black/red anyway, the restriction is basically reminder text. As worded you can't spend this to activate abilities either, but that's not a huge deal—we'll just save this particular land for casting our spells.

[void_nothing]

Yes, this is a very strong cycle, and being fetchable puts it potentially over the edge.

Is lesser usability in tricolor-or-greater decks restrictive? Yes, but it means that certain (exactly bicolor) decks can just have Alpha duals

[folding_music]

spacemonaut, thanks for the retemplating!

Do you think they'd be acceptable with the basic types stripped away? I know it's a deckbuilding requirement but I think it's pretty big, not being able to tap them to cast colourless rocks and being tied up on which lands you can use to pay activation costs, especially assuming the set has no other duals or rainbow lands.

[spacemonaut]

Strip the basic land types and give it a novel ETB drawback trigger like "When CARDNAME enters the battlefield, you lose 1 life." and I'd call it workable.