MTG Salvation

http://www.wizards.com/Magic/Magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/feature/239

Land and Enchantment were so close (fewer than 30 votes apart!) that a supplementary vote is being held. See how MTGS has voted in previous weeks below.

Week 1: Card Type

So frustrated that this will be open all week. What a waste!

Second verse, same as the first. Voted Enchantment again, because I think there's just so much more room for design in Enchantment, as the linked article pointed out. Even if we don't wind up with something hugely competitive, I think we've got more room to do something fun and interesting in Enchantment than Land. More knobs to turn and all that.

I've said this once, and I'll say it again: Lands don't have the design space that Enchantments have. It's way too early to start restricting ourselves into such a tiny area to work with.

Vote enchantments.

Voted enchantment. So much more interesting than lands in terms of design space. I doubt a land that the community helped make would be good outside of EDH and maybe standard either.

Quote from MtGColorPie

I've said this once, and I'll say it again: Lands don't have the design space that Enchantments have. It's way too early to start restricting ourselves into such a tiny area to work with.

Vote enchantments.

This is my reasoning. There's just not that much room for a fun, interesting, playable land card that would fit the criteria of YMTC (single card, no keywords or block-specific mechanics, etc.)

Enchantments, on the other hand, are wide open. If they win, I'd expect the next vote would be for Global vs. Aura, which should help narrow things down a bit. I'm hoping for an Aura, myself, but an interesting global enchantment would be just fine too.

Voted Land the first time, this time Enchantment. I realized the error of my ways.

Every one of those lands you listed is ancient and wouldn't come close to seeing print today. If Wizards did want those effects today, they'd either be on enchantments (Tabernacle, Chasm) or artifacts (Kjeldoran Outpost, Maze of Ith).

Also, as a rule, lands today tap for mana--Maro has specifically said that they don't like lands that don't.

Quote from Bread Connoisseur

Voted enchantment. So much more interesting than lands in terms of design space. I doubt a land that the community helped make would be good outside of EDH and maybe standard either.

The flip side is that enchantments generally suck (especially Auras).

Quote from luminum can

Enchantments, on the other hand, are wide open. If they win, I'd expect the next vote would be for Global vs. Aura, which should help narrow things down a bit. I'm hoping for an Aura, myself, but an interesting global enchantment would be just fine too.

I want a World Enchantment.

The problem with Auras is that they suck 95% of the time. If we go Aura, we should try to enchant something unusual.

Quote from Plaguefather

The Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale would like a word with you!

As well as Kjeldoran Outpost and co.

Glacial Chasm as a few queries for you, as well as Maze of Ith...

Point is, there's a plethora of lands that do things besides tap for mana, and some don't even tap for mana at all.

They don't print lands without mana abilities (or something equivalent) anymore. If they did, land would be a more interesting option.

cool thing about this, is that no matter what gets picked, it won't be a repeat type from previous YMTC. voted land, but honestly would be happy with either.

And yea, it begat upon the new hour of the eighteenth sun, Marz, di-millenia-and-thirteen; The long war of enchantment and land.

If land wins, I see only two possibilities.

1) The land is crowdsourced and/or nerfed by R&D into absolute unplayability because it's a land and the entire exercise is a giant waste of everyone's time and everyone dreads opening it in packs. Remember Unluckyman's Paradise? Gemstone Caverns saw a lot of play, didn't it?

2) They allow the land to be pushed above the curve due to it being a YMTC. It's a minimum three of in every deck, dominates Standard for its entire lifespan, seems some play in older formats and is $50 on the secondary market. Everyone dreads seeing the card on the other side of the table.

Voted enchantment again. Yay team enchantment!

Still voting for Land. Why? Two reasons.

1) Non-Aura Enchantments designed in the Modern era have been erratic. The ones that have seen heavy play are horribly overpowered (Bitterblossom, Glare of Subdual, Omniscience, etc), and that won't happen with this YMTC. Most have been mundane, narrow, or overcosted (Arcane Melee anyone?). And after the color voting, design space will narrow tremendously in order to preserve the Color Pie.

2) I want a Terramorphic Expanse variant that fetches like n Scrying" target="blank">Sylvan Scrying. I'm fine with the land going into my hand, but it's time for a fetch that has an unrestricted search.

Design space is already sorely limited because there is a limit to the number of options able to be put on each poll. The mass public can't possibly be truly creative in this endeavor. In fact, it would be very shrewd and a little shady of WotC, but it's possible that they have designed all of the outcomes of the polls already and are simply letting us choose our own adventure through to them. Realistically there must be thousands of cards they've designed but found no place to put, what better way to put one out there than guiding us through a series of predetermined options.

Well that's fairly cynical, and entirely baseless... so really I'd just like to say how much I'd hate to see people swayed from picking their gut feeling on a poll like this because of arguments like "design space." It's already limited. Pick what you picked before, and if that option is gone, pick your next favorite. You'll be happiest with the outcome if you're not thinking clinically.

Quote from Plaguefather

The Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale would like a word with you!

As well as Kjeldoran Outpost and co.

Glacial Chasm as a few queries for you, as well as Maze of Ith...

Point is, there's a plethora of lands that do things besides tap for mana, and some don't even tap for mana at all.

your point is invalid

Voted for land round 1, voted for it again! VOTE LAND 2013!!!

If Land wins, we're not getting one that doesn't tap for mana for the same reason we wouldn't end up with a blue pinger if Creature had been the winning type. Design standards have changed since the time of those cards. Eye of Ugin has been the only exception in years, and the entire point of the card was to be strange and mysterious and weird, to make players wonder what it meant. YMTC doesn't have that same goal. The card that comes out of this gets reviewed and playtested and evaluated by R&D like any other card, so nothing's getting printed that they wouldn't print under normal circumstances. No color pie violations, no throwing back to old design styles that are no longer in practice. So Lands do, in fact, have a much bigger straightjacket on their potential designs.

I'm sure that if Land wins something interesting will come out of it, but the process to make it will much tougher and drier than the alternative, and I don't think it will be as satisfying a result in the end.

Quote from Plaguefather

Eye of Ugin, Vesuva, Dark Depths, there's more, but i'm not going to waste my time and others...

My point stands. They can print lands that don't have mana abilities these days and do just fine... Plus, lands don't have the inherant weakness of being an enchantment. Lands have much less hate in the wider scope of things.

as well as they can be lands with mana abilities and other abilities too. They have a quite a few out there that follow that suit.

Voted for land again. I voted for land the first time, so I felt I should stick by my decision. Besides, it seems like they are doing this 'runoff' vote just to deter people from picking land the second time around. It's like they are afraid to see it win.

It won the first time when I voted for it. I'm voting for it a second. Though TBH, I won't be sad if enchantment wins.

Voted Enchantment again. I'm not dead-set against Land; I think there's some interesting space there, and Land was my second choice after Enchantment. But I think the restrictions are probably too much for the community process, which tends to breed clunky cards (Vanish into Memory), even though R&D of course can do lands well.

I don't have any ideas for enchantment abilities yet, but I would submit this for a land:

~ enters the battlefield tapped.
t, Sacrifice ~: Search your library for a land card and put it onto the battlefield tapped. Then shuffle your library.

The tempo loss is so huge that I don't think it's broken, but you may be the judge of that. Remember that the Mirage fetchlands (Flood Plain etc.) are unplayably awful, and they don't have tempo loss this big, so being able to fetch Gaea's Cradle or Maze of Ith or Cavern of Souls is probably not broken with that kind of slowdown.

Quote from Plaguefather

Eye of Ugin, Vesuva, Dark Depths, there's more, but i'm not going to waste my time and others...

Lands don't have a mana ability or equivalent. Eye of Ugin is a really strange card as well as a really important location in the plot, and a mythic, so it's hard to justify designing many more cards like it. It also reduces costs, which is similar to producing mana. Vesuva turns into another land... which probably produces mana. It doesn't have a mana ability itself because it goes away when you turn it into a copy. Dark Depths was deliberately designed to resemble a card from Ice Age, and is, yet again, another story-relevant location, as the prison of yet another horrible world-ravaging entity.

Quote from Plaguefather

Eye of Ugin, Vesuva, Dark Depths, there's more, but i'm not going to waste my time and others...

My point stands. They can print lands that don't have mana abilities these days and do just fine... Plus, lands don't have the inherant weakness of being an enchantment. Lands have much less hate in the wider scope of things.

EDIT: And it seems i'm not the only one who thinks so, land is winning on this poll.

Eye of Ugin: Deliberately bizarre and mysterious, mythic, story-related
Vesuva: Doesn't have a mana ability in the same way that Evolving Wilds doesn't have a mana ability; it doesn't produce mana on its own but it becomes a mana-producing land (in 99% of circumstances) once it's on the battlefield.
Dark Depths: Coldsnap is not a great place to look for cards that exemplify modern design techniques. It was the first non-mana-producing-land printed in years at the time, and only because of the goofy "long-lost-set" gimmick of Coldsnap.

Choosing card types based on inherent playability seems kind of silly to me. The design itself will, in the end, determine if the card is strong or not. If Enchantment is an inherently more fragile card type, the design itself can be more powerful to compensate.

Lands have the "inherent weakness" of having so much limitation on what they can actually do and not end up broken, and in how little wiggle room there is if a design chosen for YMTC ends up being problematic in playtesting. What to do we do if the card's too strong? Make it come into play tapped? Make the activation cost higher? Make you pay life to activate it? The choices are very finite.

I'd much rather start with a wider playing field to let submitted designs cover a wide range of possibilities, then narrow from there. It makes for a far more interesting and robust YMTC experience than deciding between a far more limited range of land options and making some dry, mundane tweaks.

Voted land. Enchantment I don't love because it will be limited to a color and restricted in design by the color pie much more than a land would be. I was this to be playable like crucible is, very good in the right deck, OK in some decks, and probably never terrible.

Also I happen to love legendary lands, since they can do so much and then be inherently restricted in scope because of how lands work. It would be super awesome for WOTC to make a land that helps out the eternal formats right now. Something that helps take the stress off the need for dual lands would be fantastic to help vintage along, though I am unsure what. Maybe like a fetch land that can only get basics but gets them untapped and costs life or something...

Not sure if I worded this properly but here's something that I feel is very interesting...

Enchantment 1W -
Any time a spell or effect would cause more than one of a player's cards to go to the graveyard, cancel that spell or effect.
The affected player must then select one permanent and exile it.

Essentially it hates out 2 for 1 effects. Sweepers would become single target edicts (sort of). It screws up dredge, it messes with pyroclasm, Rakdos's Return would function in a completely different way. Of course Terminus and exile effects would still work.
It might need some tweaking but I think that the card would be incredibly awesome to build.