Glacial Fortress versus Arcane Sanctum, etc.
michaelj | June 20, 2009 | 11:24 pm
Glacial Fortress
Glacial Fortress enters the battlefield tapped unless you control a Plains or an Island.
T: Add W or U to your mana pool.
Last week BDM and I were discussing the new cycle of M10 dual lands, including Glacial Fortress.
The first half of my snap judgment — which I doubt many of you will disagree with — is that Glacial Fortress is strictly better than Coastal Tower.
Really going out on a limb on that one, I know!
Glacial Fortress is exactly the same card as Coastal Tower… except that sometimes it is better (that is, it comes into play untapped sometimes, whereas Coastal Tower never does). This is really just the latest in a long line of dual lands (or tri-lands) that are better than Coastal Tower.
For instance Arcane Sanctum is a Coastal Tower that can also tap for Black mana.
Similarly Hallowed Fountain is a Coastal Tower that not only doesn’t come into play tapped if you don’t want it to… it is best friends with Flooded Strand and a whole cycle of pre-existing dual lands.
The message is clear: Coastal Tower was good enough for Standard, Block, and in some cases even Extended play when it was in-print, but we consider it not-good-enough any more.
Glacial Fortress is clearly a cool land (and the precursor to a cool cycle of lands), but the second half of my assessment in BDM’s direction was that I think that Glacial Fortress is also more limiting than Coastal Tower. That is, I believe it will see less broad (as opposed to less wide) play; Glacial Fortress may well see play in more raw decks, but I would guess it will see play in fewer kinds of decks than Coastal Tower.
What does that mean?
In Coastal Tower days, it would not have been unusual to see Coastal Tower in play next to Swamp. I don’t think we will often see Glacial Fortress next to Swamp, however (except, perhaps, a singleton Forest that interacts with an opponent’s projected Path to Exile). The structure of this cycle of dual lands is nigh-linear. That is, we are encouraged to play Glacial Fortress specifically with Plains and Islands, we get too much value by playing these cards together to expand into playing it in a deck with Swamp, given the alternatives. BDM tried to project a corner cases, but at least given our current available palette of dual lands (and the like), in Standard we would be much more likely to play Arcane Sanctum next to Swamp than Glacial Fortress.
So in that sense, it is clear that while Glacial Fortress is the superior card to Coastal Tower, at the same time, its bundled incentives make it likely to be a less broadly played card… and therefore might be less interesting!
Interestingly, in Extended, Glacial Fortress makes a nice neighbor to Hallowed Fountain (and even Godless Shrine, Breeding Pool, and many other potential combinations, but mostly Hallowed Fountain). It is probably less friendly a neighbor than Flooded Strand, but synergistic nevertheless.
And that is my snap judgment on Glacial Fortress.
LOVE
MIKE
That’s actually an interesting way of looking at the card.
That’s about opposite of how I see these duals. Much as the ability to come into…um, enter the battlefield untapped is really cool, I tend to view that as an extra perk of having the proper basic land types, instead of as an incentive to go straight UW (or whatever) for the consistent untapped land.
I have a feeling that we’ll see Glacial Fortresses sitting next to Swamps and/or Forests a respectable amount of the time, considering how many 3+ color decks people are wont to play currently.
As a side note: Why is this card named Glacial Fortress, but is not a Snow Land? There’s no reason for it to be a Snow Land in isolation, but then again why bother making Snow a mechanical feature of Magic & not use it for cards whose names invoke Snow? Frown.
Here’s to hoping you’re right, would be nice to see some two-colored decks in the future! I’m not particularly fond of these dual lands, I think they favor control decks just a bit too much, as you don’t want to play too many of them with aggro one-drops.
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@Dochetwas - It’s a nice land, not a snow land. The clue is in the name.
For too long we have been complacently filling our decks with all the colours of the pie. It will be nice to see a return to two colour magic decks for a while. Though I imagine we will see both in the upcoming standard. At least they’ll be no vivid lands.
Maro stated that the next two blocks are not going to be gold-themed like recent sets, but there are numerous competitive two-color decks in standard right now. I like these lands, and it would have been even sweeter as a 10-card cycle.
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I’m disappointed that these lands aren’t typed with the proper land type. Since granting that type automatically grants the land the ability to tap for the respective mana, it really seems any land that taps for colored mana of a certain type unconditionally should BE that type. Painlands didnt have to count, as it was add mana and pain, not tap, add mana. Yes, these would be more powerful in formats with the original fetches, but there really isn’t anything in print in standard that would abuse the interaction, and they can always print BASIC on any new fetch style effects if they dont want this to be searched up. I think itd be great design space to have alot more non-basic typed lands, and only give green access to search up non-basic forests, restricting other colors to basic land search. my 2 cents on the design. And if you draw 2, would it be so terrible if the first one that CIPT turned on the 2nd in your grip for turn2? In general, I like the design alot though, very elegant, and generally wont have any disadvantage after turn1 in most games.