I cant help much but with my experience with reliquary tower, three factors need to be in effect.
-are you drawing a lot of cards?
-are you wanting the large hand to have options?
-how many cards can you play on your (or any) turn?
My dragon deck does run reliquary tower, but it draws a lot. I like having options and i can get to the point where i am playing five or more dragons a turn.
I think I only ever have Reliquary Tower in one deck. Xenagod wants it because when you draw 12+ cards at a time, you still want to reliably hit those land drops and chain that efficient ramp to enable consistent pressure or threaten one-shot kills.
Scavenger Grounds is one of the best colorless lands printed in recent history. Though if you've graveyard packages it's difficult to include in. It's perfect for linear strategies that don't wanna miss a beat.
There're more options than just these lands.
I normally don't go over 9-10 colorless lands in a mono deck, much less for 3C and above.
not many of my decks are totally reliant on keeping my commander in play so it doesn't matter too much, and they'll generally die to collateral damage anyway. other decks running theft effects aren't super abundant for the same reason. things tend to just die.
reliquary tower i've honestly been cutting from most decks lately too. its effect is great, but i've been finding that if i'm drawing enough cards to need to not want to discard... well i've already won anyway. its pretty rare to draw say, 20+ cards and not win on the spot.
pretty much agree w/ these last few posts, i will only play temple of the false god in decks w/ green ramp; otherwise its always the 4th land you hit & that just sux
If people are sick of reading about stuff just stop taking part. You have 100% control over what you read. Simic Ascendancy isn't going to get banned just because you didn't tell someone to shut up on the internet.
Myriad Landscape is the best of that list, but every one of those are easy cuts, really. I wouldn't bat an eye or think twice about cutting any of them.
reliquary tower - deck building trap, i'd say. even when it IS useful (i.e. when you have 8 or more cards in hand), having 7 of the best is 99% of the time as good as having 15 cards in hand. Also, it doesn't allow you to discard cards into the GY that's actually useful there (life from the loam et al). i'd give it a rating of 1/10 in almost all decks outside of builds where there are actual mechanical reasons to have a giant grip Multani, Maro-Sorcerer, for example
scavenger grounds vs bojuka bog - they're both good, i'd say. the bog is better against specific players with GY decks, and scavenger grounds if you won't end up hosing yourself. One thing that's worthy of noting, even though the act of putting a land into play is a special action that can't be interacted with, the trigger of putting them into play/activating scavenger grounds uses the stack (i.e. trickbind and stifle can stop them).
It's not on your list, but you might wanna look up a land called Thawing Glaciers. I've used it in slower control builds where land-drops matter, and also tried it out in a legacy deck (yes, it's potentially that good). combine it with land untap effects and you can end up ramping multiple lands within a turn (it bounces at the beginning of the cleanup step). it's especially good in non-green decks that need the ramp.
The others can be quite dependant upon the rest of the deck. i don't remember using any of the other lands you've mentioned in-game though. aside from my lands deck, all my other builds have a very specific strategy of killing my opponents, so they are rather light on removal and other utility things. whenever you try to assess whether or not a card is good in your deck or not, try to remember on what your strategy is, and if it builds to it or not. usually helps.
reliquary tower - deck building trap, i'd say. even when it IS useful (i.e. when you have 8 or more cards in hand), having 7 of the best is 99% of the time as good as having 15 cards in hand. Also, it doesn't allow you to discard cards into the GY that's actually useful there (life from the loam et al). i'd give it a rating of 1/10 in almost all decks outside of builds where there are actual mechanical reasons to have a giant grip Multani, Maro-Sorcerer, for example
scavenger grounds vs bojuka bog - they're both good, i'd say. the bog is better against specific players with GY decks, and scavenger grounds if you won't end up hosing yourself. One thing that's worthy of noting, even though the act of putting a land into play is a special action that can't be interacted with, the trigger of putting them into play/activating scavenger grounds uses the stack (i.e. trickbind and stifle can stop them).
It's not on your list, but you might wanna look up a land called Thawing Glaciers. I've used it in slower control builds where land-drops matter, and also tried it out in a legacy deck (yes, it's potentially that good). combine it with land untap effects and you can end up ramping multiple lands within a turn (it bounces at the beginning of the cleanup step). it's especially good in non-green decks that need the ramp.
The others can be quite dependant upon the rest of the deck. i don't remember using any of the other lands you've mentioned in-game though. aside from my lands deck, all my other builds have a very specific strategy of killing my opponents, so they are rather light on removal and other utility things. whenever you try to assess whether or not a card is good in your deck or not, try to remember on what your strategy is, and if it builds to it or not. usually helps.
I know Thawing Glaciers of course, but currently don't own any copies. My MtG budget is not unlimited and I prefer investing it in nonland cards and/or lands with more unique effects than simple ramp (e.g. Phyrexian Tower or Yavimaya Hollow). I absolutely believe you that it is really good though!
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Still convinced the guy on Beseech the Queen is wearing a Mitra-type hat. Wake up sheeple!
I'm kind of baffled by the hate on Reliquary Tower. Unless my intention is to discard for reanimation purposes or other shenanigans, I generally like to keep my cards in my hand. One to three-color mana bases can easily handle including the tower, and it's a favorable effect tacked onto a mana-producing land. Of course, there are decks that don't want it or will never need it, and shouldn't use the slot.
My Goreclaw, Terror of Qal Sisma deck has a plan to get the tower out, simply because a Rishkar's Expertise or some such can draw a massive amount of cards, and my super Timmy fatty deck needs to keep deploying fatties with impunity.
I'm kind of baffled by the hate on Reliquary Tower. Unless my intention is to discard for reanimation purposes or other shenanigans, I generally like to keep my cards in my hand. One to three-color mana bases can easily handle including the tower, and it's a favorable effect tacked onto a mana-producing land.
Yes but colorless lands have an opportunity cost, and the effect is rarely great. So other, much better, utility lands take up the spots.
If people are sick of reading about stuff just stop taking part. You have 100% control over what you read. Simic Ascendancy isn't going to get banned just because you didn't tell someone to shut up on the internet.
I'm kind of baffled by the hate on Reliquary Tower. Unless my intention is to discard for reanimation purposes or other shenanigans, I generally like to keep my cards in my hand. One to three-color mana bases can easily handle including the tower, and it's a favorable effect tacked onto a mana-producing land. Of course, there are decks that don't want it or will never need it, and shouldn't use the slot.
My Goreclaw, Terror of Qal Sisma deck has a plan to get the tower out, simply because a Rishkar's Expertise or some such can draw a massive amount of cards, and my super Timmy fatty deck needs to keep deploying fatties with impunity.
At it's best, it's win-more. At it's worst, it keeps you off a critical colour. It is far worse than a basic land, and yes basics are good. They provide colour, and don't open up vulnerability to wasteland. None of these are true for Tower.
I'm kind of baffled by the hate on Reliquary Tower. Unless my intention is to discard for reanimation purposes or other shenanigans, I generally like to keep my cards in my hand.
The problem with Reliquary Tower isn't that the effect can't be useful. The problem is that very very few decks actually need that effect (the best 7 cards in your hand is very nearly always as useful as keeping all 8+, and sometimes even more useful), and running a colorless-producing land over a color-producing land is a real cost.
I see the counter arguments against Reliquary Tower and agree that it is not an auto-include in any and all EDH decks (I used to think so), but since I started this thread I have been paying attention to how my games went with respect to having / not having the Tower and I found that I was never mad to have it on the field and that it was actually quite useful in some instances.
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Still convinced the guy on Beseech the Queen is wearing a Mitra-type hat. Wake up sheeple!
I'm kind of baffled by the hate on Reliquary Tower. Unless my intention is to discard for reanimation purposes or other shenanigans, I generally like to keep my cards in my hand. One to three-color mana bases can easily handle including the tower, and it's a favorable effect tacked onto a mana-producing land. Of course, there are decks that don't want it or will never need it, and shouldn't use the slot.
My Goreclaw, Terror of Qal Sisma deck has a plan to get the tower out, simply because a Rishkar's Expertise or some such can draw a massive amount of cards, and my super Timmy fatty deck needs to keep deploying fatties with impunity.
At it's best, it's win-more. At it's worst, it keeps you off a critical colour. It is far worse than a basic land, and yes basics are good. They provide colour, and don't open up vulnerability to wasteland. None of these are true for Tower.
Win-more at best? Come on. More cards = more resources. Many decks would like to keep the cards that they've made an effort to draw, and the tower helps with that for the low, low cost of a land slot, specifically a utility land slot since, you know, it's providing a desired utility. And Wasteland is not a factor in my life, but by your reasoning, my opponents would never target it anyway.
Yes but colorless lands have an opportunity cost, and the effect is rarely great. So other, much better, utility lands take up the spots.
I totally understand and I agree with your reasoning. I suppose my viewpoint is informed by the fact that most of my decks are built to draw cards, and I haven't had a problem crafting a mana base, including other utility lands, to which the tower was a detriment. Obviously, it doesn't go in every deck, but maybe I just build a lot of decks that want it.
The problem with Reliquary Tower isn't that the effect can't be useful. The problem is that very very few decks actually need that effect (the best 7 cards in your hand is very nearly always as useful as keeping all 8+, and sometimes even more useful), and running a colorless-producing land over a color-producing land is a real cost.
Yours is a similar, and thus similarly valid, argument as MRHblue's, and I agree. I'm beginning to think that I either A) need to do more research on utility lands in general, because perhaps I'm not aware of my options or B) have a certain degree of tunnel vision when it comes to deck building, and utility lands are in my blind spot.
Overall though, I think the tower's overratedness may be being overstated. I definitely appreciate the discussion though.
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I'm kind of baffled by the hate on Reliquary Tower. Unless my intention is to discard for reanimation purposes or other shenanigans, I generally like to keep my cards in my hand. One to three-color mana bases can easily handle including the tower, and it's a favorable effect tacked onto a mana-producing land. Of course, there are decks that don't want it or will never need it, and shouldn't use the slot.
My Goreclaw, Terror of Qal Sisma deck has a plan to get the tower out, simply because a Rishkar's Expertise or some such can draw a massive amount of cards, and my super Timmy fatty deck needs to keep deploying fatties with impunity.
At it's best, it's win-more. At it's worst, it keeps you off a critical colour. It is far worse than a basic land, and yes basics are good. They provide colour, and don't open up vulnerability to wasteland. None of these are true for Tower.
Win-more at best? Come on. More cards = more resources. Many decks would like to keep the cards that they've made an effort to draw, and the tower helps with that for the low, low cost of a land slot, specifically a utility land slot since, you know, it's providing a desired utility. And Wasteland is not a factor in my life, but by your reasoning, my opponents would never target it anyway.
"More resources" are only relevant if you're using them. With that many in hand, you're not possibly using them all, without some sort of arbitrarily large resource pool. In which case you still don't need this when you instead just need a Fireball. It's not like the graveyard isn't a second hand anyway...But hey.
I use Reliquary Tower in my Shadowborn Apostle deck due the prevalence of Cyclonic Rift in my playgroup. One too many times I've gotten 12-15 Apostles on the board, had someone Rift them to my hand on my endstep and then had my GY exiled before my next turn.
It's the only deck I currently have RT in anymore, and even then it was a matter of finding a copy to put in because I had taken it out of all my decks previously.
I can see where some want it because of being able to draw an insane amount of cards in certain decks, but reading this thread has somewhat changed my mind on the usefulness there.
Actually, I'm changing my opinion on Temple. Meteor Crater is better. It has a much lower hurdle to clear. All you need is one colored permanent to get at least one mana out of it. And you're certain to have one colored permanent long before you have four other lands.
I've tried using Meteor Crater before. In my experience it does nothing a lot more often than Temple does nothing.
As long as we can agree they are both absolutely awful.
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Card advantage is not the same thing as card draw. Something for 2B cannot be strictly worse than something for BBB or 3BB. If you're taking out Swords to Plowshares for Plummet, you're a fool. Stop doing these things!
I don't include Reliquary Tower in my decks at the moment because of color restrictions and it not fitting in my strategies.
However, Cyclonic Rift being the strongest card in the format has changed how I value unlimited hand-size. It's not such a bad thing to have when you can count on Cyclonic Rift being played in at least half of the games you play each session.
That being said, I still think that utility lands are generally over-valued. A deck isn't stronger because of the amount of utility lands you can squeeze in there. It's typical that a better tuned, stronger deck will run a lower land count. And by virtue of lower land count, they will run few utility lands.
I'm kind of baffled by the hate on Reliquary Tower. Unless my intention is to discard for reanimation purposes or other shenanigans, I generally like to keep my cards in my hand.
This is exactly why the card is so heavily overplayed.
It has been said a few times now, but I feel redundancy has value here, given how widespread the issue is.
For Reliquary Tower to be worth including instead of a colored source (basic land), it needs to provide value from its secondary effect the significant majority of the games it is played. Value in this case means more than simply preventing you from discarding a card or two - the weakest card in your hand that would have been discarded needs to be relevant to the outcome of the game, and that is simply so rarely the case. In most circumstances, the best seven cards in hand is effectively just as good as all eight or nine, because your ability to play those cards is constrained by more than simply having them.
This also requires you to consistently consistently reach more than seven cards in hand at the end of each of your turns. Something not easy to do for most decks. Even decks that consistently draw multiple cards a turn will often need to deliberately stunt their own development to pull that off. And then we look to the graveyard. Decks that actively play from their graveyard in some fashion are common, and unlikely to be inconvenienced by discarding a card rather than holding it in hand. The only real value Reliquary Tower has here is the niche of protecting unplayed cards from graveyard disruption, provided the other requirements for its use have also been met. Even then, preventing you from discarding in such a deck can easily become a drawback.
Assuming yhe deck actually meets the requirements for Reliquary Tower to be good, we now get to look at what other utility lands it is competing with. The number of colorless land slots is not limitless, and goes down rapidly as the colors in the deck increases,
The ones that will always be included before Reliquary Tower are Ancient Tomb, Strip Mine, and Wasteland. Other high priorities include, if the deck allows them, Kor Haven, Phyrexian Tower, and Yavimaya Hollow. There is a slew of other utility lands with more niche roles, but are universally better than Reliquary Tower in the decks that want them.
It is simply extraordinary rare that Reliquary Tower's niche is better than the other options available, and the deck simply runs out of allotted space for such lands before it should be added.
Just because the card helped that one time you drew 40 cards from Blue Sun's Zenith and didn't immediately win does not make the card good.
Even against Cyclonic Rift, unless it is cast at the end of my turn explicitly to force me to discard, I will rarely end up losing more than one or two things - little more than an inconvenience.
Just because the card helped that one time you drew 40 cards from Blue Sun's Zenith and didn't immediately win does not make the card good.
Even against Cyclonic Rift, unless it is cast at the end of my turn explicitly to force me to discard, I will rarely end up losing more than one or two things - little more than an inconvenience.
I don't think anyone has said that about Tower and a 43 cmc BSZ. Although having an unlimited hand-size is pretty good with Necropotence.
Some of this hate towards Reliquary Tower is because of a "scrub-factor" that's being linked to Reliquary Tower. Reliquary Tower isn't going to win a spot in most of my decks, but not having to discard being good isn't some ultra-niche case. And many of the cards that it's being compared to aren't that great either. Might as well go out of our way to hate on the other over-played non-basics as well (e.g. Kor Haven, Yavimaya Hollow).
For some builds, discarding a card means not having access to it for the remainder of a game and the games go on for more than an hour for some players.
So the general problem is that colorless lands DO COME WITH A COST. They are not colored lands to pay for spells. A huge mistake that even mono-colored decks do is run too many colorless lands. The reason is that you can normally get great pay-off with cards like Extraplanar Lens, Gauntlet of Power, Caged Sun.
If you're looking to use the mana doublers in mono-color then you really should only be running colorless lands do a lot for your deck configuration. Deck makers make huge mistakes in overrating colorless lands for their builds.
Then colorless lands have no real business being in three or more colored decks (unless they are fixers like Krosan Verge for example). Definitely the biggest mistake I see most players make. And it get's them in the end. Sure enough they'll play a lot of games where they just haven't had enough colored sources to get early advantage.
If you have colorless lands, they need to be super special to what your deck is trying to do. This is where Reliquary Tower fails, in that it is not special to most decks and I'll point out the reasons why.
The second mistake that people make with running Reliquary Tower is when they have cards that use your graveyard as a resource. If you even have a couple of cards that might use your graveyard, then you should avoid Reliquary Tower.
Discarding cards can be beneficial to this strategy. There are very few decks that don't have a few means of using your graveyard. Very few.
The final reason why Reliquary Tower in generally is an overrated land choice, is that it is a win-more type card. If you're discarding cards due to hand size then you are already normally have enough cards to cast.
Here is the important part; Your bottleneck is mainly going to be casting your spells. How many games do you lose when you simply couldn't cast everything in a timely manner?
So in general excess cards might not even apply to what the constraints of your deck is.
Then there is the flip side and you have some sort of incredible mana engine, where you can cast your spells in hand, and so you do, and now you don't even care about hand size because you've a cast most of your spells (and realistically won).
There are going to be very few games where this interaction of having a large hand size, over a select 7 cards, is going to really be the deciding factor that wins you the game.
Normally you can discard down to 7 cards, that has a plan of action, that's going to fit around your mana constraints anyway.
I have played several hundred commander decks, and it didn't take me long to figure out the Reliquary Tower in general was a poor choice. Over the last 6 years all but one of my decks still plays it, and it's only because it actually fits the deck configuration. The main problem is that people don't know WHAT decks they should play it in.
I only play Reliquary Tower in a single deck. It meets all the criteria into making it an OK land for the deck. Not great but fine.
1) Doesn't use graveyard as a resource.
2) I have moderate extra draw, and I am looking to grind out opponents with resources, so every card in hand can count.
3) Two color deck.
4) Early colored mana fixing is not too important, as I'm looking to make the game go long.
5) No mana-doublers off colored sources.
I feel like the sweet spot for colors is two color decks in general, as mono-colored can suffer from not getting the advantages of the good mana doublers, and decks have no business playing colorless lands in three or more colors, unless they do something extraordinarily special for the build.
Other mana doublers for mono-colored are to name a few examples; Blue has High Tide, Red has Gauntlet of Might, Green has Vernal Bloom, Black has Crypt Ghast. There are more, but I'm just pointing out why often colorless lands are a poor choice for mono-colored.
Then 3 or more colored decks will always be better off having a colored mana source over Reliquary Tower.
-are you drawing a lot of cards?
-are you wanting the large hand to have options?
-how many cards can you play on your (or any) turn?
My dragon deck does run reliquary tower, but it draws a lot. I like having options and i can get to the point where i am playing five or more dragons a turn.
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Temple is overrated, much like Reliquary Tower.
Scavenger Grounds is one of the best colorless lands printed in recent history. Though if you've graveyard packages it's difficult to include in. It's perfect for linear strategies that don't wanna miss a beat.
There're more options than just these lands.
I normally don't go over 9-10 colorless lands in a mono deck, much less for 3C and above.
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not many of my decks are totally reliant on keeping my commander in play so it doesn't matter too much, and they'll generally die to collateral damage anyway. other decks running theft effects aren't super abundant for the same reason. things tend to just die.
reliquary tower i've honestly been cutting from most decks lately too. its effect is great, but i've been finding that if i'm drawing enough cards to need to not want to discard... well i've already won anyway. its pretty rare to draw say, 20+ cards and not win on the spot.
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reliquary tower - deck building trap, i'd say. even when it IS useful (i.e. when you have 8 or more cards in hand), having 7 of the best is 99% of the time as good as having 15 cards in hand. Also, it doesn't allow you to discard cards into the GY that's actually useful there (life from the loam et al). i'd give it a rating of 1/10 in almost all decks outside of builds where there are actual mechanical reasons to have a giant grip Multani, Maro-Sorcerer, for example
scavenger grounds vs bojuka bog - they're both good, i'd say. the bog is better against specific players with GY decks, and scavenger grounds if you won't end up hosing yourself. One thing that's worthy of noting, even though the act of putting a land into play is a special action that can't be interacted with, the trigger of putting them into play/activating scavenger grounds uses the stack (i.e. trickbind and stifle can stop them).
It's not on your list, but you might wanna look up a land called Thawing Glaciers. I've used it in slower control builds where land-drops matter, and also tried it out in a legacy deck (yes, it's potentially that good). combine it with land untap effects and you can end up ramping multiple lands within a turn (it bounces at the beginning of the cleanup step). it's especially good in non-green decks that need the ramp.
The others can be quite dependant upon the rest of the deck. i don't remember using any of the other lands you've mentioned in-game though. aside from my lands deck, all my other builds have a very specific strategy of killing my opponents, so they are rather light on removal and other utility things. whenever you try to assess whether or not a card is good in your deck or not, try to remember on what your strategy is, and if it builds to it or not. usually helps.
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My Goreclaw, Terror of Qal Sisma deck has a plan to get the tower out, simply because a Rishkar's Expertise or some such can draw a massive amount of cards, and my super Timmy fatty deck needs to keep deploying fatties with impunity.
Also, blue players love their Cyclonic Rifts and occasional Devastation Tides.
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At it's best, it's win-more. At it's worst, it keeps you off a critical colour. It is far worse than a basic land, and yes basics are good. They provide colour, and don't open up vulnerability to wasteland. None of these are true for Tower.
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Win-more at best? Come on. More cards = more resources. Many decks would like to keep the cards that they've made an effort to draw, and the tower helps with that for the low, low cost of a land slot, specifically a utility land slot since, you know, it's providing a desired utility. And Wasteland is not a factor in my life, but by your reasoning, my opponents would never target it anyway.
I totally understand and I agree with your reasoning. I suppose my viewpoint is informed by the fact that most of my decks are built to draw cards, and I haven't had a problem crafting a mana base, including other utility lands, to which the tower was a detriment. Obviously, it doesn't go in every deck, but maybe I just build a lot of decks that want it.
Yours is a similar, and thus similarly valid, argument as MRHblue's, and I agree. I'm beginning to think that I either A) need to do more research on utility lands in general, because perhaps I'm not aware of my options or B) have a certain degree of tunnel vision when it comes to deck building, and utility lands are in my blind spot.
Overall though, I think the tower's overratedness may be being overstated. I definitely appreciate the discussion though.
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"More resources" are only relevant if you're using them. With that many in hand, you're not possibly using them all, without some sort of arbitrarily large resource pool. In which case you still don't need this when you instead just need a Fireball. It's not like the graveyard isn't a second hand anyway...But hey.
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It's the only deck I currently have RT in anymore, and even then it was a matter of finding a copy to put in because I had taken it out of all my decks previously.
I can see where some want it because of being able to draw an insane amount of cards in certain decks, but reading this thread has somewhat changed my mind on the usefulness there.
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As long as we can agree they are both absolutely awful.
On phasing:
However, Cyclonic Rift being the strongest card in the format has changed how I value unlimited hand-size. It's not such a bad thing to have when you can count on Cyclonic Rift being played in at least half of the games you play each session.
That being said, I still think that utility lands are generally over-valued. A deck isn't stronger because of the amount of utility lands you can squeeze in there. It's typical that a better tuned, stronger deck will run a lower land count. And by virtue of lower land count, they will run few utility lands.
This is exactly why the card is so heavily overplayed.
It has been said a few times now, but I feel redundancy has value here, given how widespread the issue is.
For Reliquary Tower to be worth including instead of a colored source (basic land), it needs to provide value from its secondary effect the significant majority of the games it is played. Value in this case means more than simply preventing you from discarding a card or two - the weakest card in your hand that would have been discarded needs to be relevant to the outcome of the game, and that is simply so rarely the case. In most circumstances, the best seven cards in hand is effectively just as good as all eight or nine, because your ability to play those cards is constrained by more than simply having them.
This also requires you to consistently consistently reach more than seven cards in hand at the end of each of your turns. Something not easy to do for most decks. Even decks that consistently draw multiple cards a turn will often need to deliberately stunt their own development to pull that off. And then we look to the graveyard. Decks that actively play from their graveyard in some fashion are common, and unlikely to be inconvenienced by discarding a card rather than holding it in hand. The only real value Reliquary Tower has here is the niche of protecting unplayed cards from graveyard disruption, provided the other requirements for its use have also been met. Even then, preventing you from discarding in such a deck can easily become a drawback.
Assuming yhe deck actually meets the requirements for Reliquary Tower to be good, we now get to look at what other utility lands it is competing with. The number of colorless land slots is not limitless, and goes down rapidly as the colors in the deck increases,
The ones that will always be included before Reliquary Tower are Ancient Tomb, Strip Mine, and Wasteland. Other high priorities include, if the deck allows them, Kor Haven, Phyrexian Tower, and Yavimaya Hollow. There is a slew of other utility lands with more niche roles, but are universally better than Reliquary Tower in the decks that want them.
It is simply extraordinary rare that Reliquary Tower's niche is better than the other options available, and the deck simply runs out of allotted space for such lands before it should be added.
Just because the card helped that one time you drew 40 cards from Blue Sun's Zenith and didn't immediately win does not make the card good.
Even against Cyclonic Rift, unless it is cast at the end of my turn explicitly to force me to discard, I will rarely end up losing more than one or two things - little more than an inconvenience.
A Dying Wish
To Rise Again
Chainer, Dementia Master
Muldrotha, the Gravetide
Atraxa, Praetors' Voice
I don't think anyone has said that about Tower and a 43 cmc BSZ. Although having an unlimited hand-size is pretty good with Necropotence.
Some of this hate towards Reliquary Tower is because of a "scrub-factor" that's being linked to Reliquary Tower. Reliquary Tower isn't going to win a spot in most of my decks, but not having to discard being good isn't some ultra-niche case. And many of the cards that it's being compared to aren't that great either. Might as well go out of our way to hate on the other over-played non-basics as well (e.g. Kor Haven, Yavimaya Hollow).
For some builds, discarding a card means not having access to it for the remainder of a game and the games go on for more than an hour for some players.
If you're looking to use the mana doublers in mono-color then you really should only be running colorless lands do a lot for your deck configuration. Deck makers make huge mistakes in overrating colorless lands for their builds.
Then colorless lands have no real business being in three or more colored decks (unless they are fixers like Krosan Verge for example). Definitely the biggest mistake I see most players make. And it get's them in the end. Sure enough they'll play a lot of games where they just haven't had enough colored sources to get early advantage.
If you have colorless lands, they need to be super special to what your deck is trying to do. This is where Reliquary Tower fails, in that it is not special to most decks and I'll point out the reasons why.
The second mistake that people make with running Reliquary Tower is when they have cards that use your graveyard as a resource. If you even have a couple of cards that might use your graveyard, then you should avoid Reliquary Tower.
Discarding cards can be beneficial to this strategy. There are very few decks that don't have a few means of using your graveyard. Very few.
The final reason why Reliquary Tower in generally is an overrated land choice, is that it is a win-more type card. If you're discarding cards due to hand size then you are already normally have enough cards to cast.
Here is the important part; Your bottleneck is mainly going to be casting your spells. How many games do you lose when you simply couldn't cast everything in a timely manner?
So in general excess cards might not even apply to what the constraints of your deck is.
Then there is the flip side and you have some sort of incredible mana engine, where you can cast your spells in hand, and so you do, and now you don't even care about hand size because you've a cast most of your spells (and realistically won).
There are going to be very few games where this interaction of having a large hand size, over a select 7 cards, is going to really be the deciding factor that wins you the game.
Normally you can discard down to 7 cards, that has a plan of action, that's going to fit around your mana constraints anyway.
I have played several hundred commander decks, and it didn't take me long to figure out the Reliquary Tower in general was a poor choice. Over the last 6 years all but one of my decks still plays it, and it's only because it actually fits the deck configuration. The main problem is that people don't know WHAT decks they should play it in.
I only play Reliquary Tower in a single deck. It meets all the criteria into making it an OK land for the deck. Not great but fine.
1) Doesn't use graveyard as a resource.
2) I have moderate extra draw, and I am looking to grind out opponents with resources, so every card in hand can count.
3) Two color deck.
4) Early colored mana fixing is not too important, as I'm looking to make the game go long.
5) No mana-doublers off colored sources.
I feel like the sweet spot for colors is two color decks in general, as mono-colored can suffer from not getting the advantages of the good mana doublers, and decks have no business playing colorless lands in three or more colors, unless they do something extraordinarily special for the build.
Other mana doublers for mono-colored are to name a few examples; Blue has High Tide, Red has Gauntlet of Might, Green has Vernal Bloom, Black has Crypt Ghast. There are more, but I'm just pointing out why often colorless lands are a poor choice for mono-colored.
Then 3 or more colored decks will always be better off having a colored mana source over Reliquary Tower.
Niv-Mizzet Reborn
Feather, the Redeemed
Estrid, the Masked
Teshar
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