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