Land Designs

ZephyrPhantom Given that there were 18 creatures with tap abilities in M21, this just might work. I do wonder if it's still a little too powerful. lol, I forgot how difficult lands can be.

MaiApologies (She/Her)  I like the flavor of this card with the reward for attacking. Looking at other lands that give haste, I do think uncommon is too good for this.

PEacefulOtter  Ah yes, I was thinking I'd get a raid submission. I'm curious if this is balanced enough. I think it probably is since raid has it's owner requirements. I think the raid ability should come first since it deals with tapped-ness.

Jartis So much going on with this card but it all works together so nicely. It's still too good to not enter tapped, lol. I'm not sure about Elemental but I can't think of anything else that might fit.

Flo00 I think there's an unwritten rule about lands not dealing damage to creatures like that on "enters". Probably because there's no defense from colorless non-spell uncounterable damage. But I like the idea of a mudslide finisher. Also, I really like the artwork you picked.


Winner PEacefulOtter

Frozen Tower
Snow Land
: Add .
Exile Frozen Tower from your graveyard: Add one mana of any color.

Do you mean "locus card" and "cycling"?

If PEacefulOtter doesn't judge within the next 24 hours or so I'm willing to judge to keep the competition moving.

melono - Congrats! (See below)

Thanks for the win!
Next up: Make a land that can destroy something.

This also fits into the current Challenge Slots.



Unstable Tower
Land - Tower
: Add :
When Unstable Tower becomes the target of a spell, sacrifice it. If you do, destroy target land.

If tower is a land type, why not use it? (Even if it has no extra meaning.)

kefke wins with Origin Pool, with Flo00 being a close second. Origin pool is interesting in that it can get back your mutated creatures and enable mutation strategies. Unstable Tower has great flavor, but I'm not sure when its ability of being targeted is gonna be relevant. It would be a workaround. viriss Selesnya Tomb is interesting design space, as in that green and white are the main token colors, but I'm not entirely sure about it being so ready at destroying all tokens.

Soulfire Monastery
Land
, Pay 2 life: Add . If that mana is spent on a sorcery spell, that spell gains lifelink.
Harsh training can pave the way to enlightenment.

Meant to reference Soulfire Grand Master. I thought idea of paying life (training) to develop some hard-hitting blows was a cute image. Worth noting the comparison to Lightning Helix, where this + Volcanic Hammer is more lenient at the cost of gaining less life.

I debated making this count for instants for a while but ultimately decided against it for multiple reasons:
A) Avoids over-rewarding Lightning Helix use. I wanted this land to make players think about how their decks should be constructed - allowing it to work on instants would just let it go in a bunch of spellslinger decks as a 1-of lifegain tool.
B) Forces you to get creative with burn spells and re-evaluate things that would normally be jank like the aforementioned Volcanic Hammer. Lava Coil and its ilk potentially become budget competitive alternatives to Helix; Roast in particular could become an attempted mainboard. White even gets its own opportunities with cards like Sunlance and Wave of Reckoning.
C) More inherent focus on expensive red spells like Fireball and Mizzium Mortars that are more likely to use the mana this card generates.


It's also a neat combo with some self-damaging cards like Madcap Experiment, Ashes to Ashes, Command the Dreadhorde and other self-damaging sorceries, allowing you to control how much damage you'll take overall if your life is high enough.

...or, judging now, after getting busy.

viriss - This is a bit of a hard one to judge. Having a land with a coloured effect that only produces colourless mana seems odd, but makes sense. However, the secondary effect itself is unusual as well. You're paying 4 mana for an effect that on most cards will only give you a one mana cost reduction. So it seems like it wants you to have a lot of mana to work with, for more spells, but also plenty of cards in hand to cast with that mana. On the other hand, it also means that for the turn you can throw out as many CMC1 red and blue spells as you want. So...all and all, it seems like it's either really good, or so situational as to be a dead drop. With the simplicity of the effect, it also seems like it could have been Uncommon, or at least had the added text needed to have a balanced dual-colour land so it could serve as colour fixing.

Flo00 & ZephyrPhantom - I'm actually going to judge these together, because the same assessment applies to both. Each of these uses the "Pay 2 life: Add N" that previously appeared on two colourless-producing legendary lands in Champions of Kamigawa. The thing is, it's not really a good mechanic. Any time you're not getting the secondary effect, these lands become just an objectively worse mana source. That said, producing coloured mana does slightly increase the utility of these lands, and the effects fit well into the colours they're meant for. On the other hand, of the two Kamigawa lands, the one that dealt with spells worked on instants and sorceries, while both of these only work with sorceries.

That said, of the two, the Izzet Laboratory ends up being slightly more useful because it has the versatility of a dual land, as well as being able to complement two different effects. On the other hand, the Soulfire Monastery only works with one colour. My search results only turned up ten damage-dealing white sorceries, all but three of which required multiple colours of mana to cast, and not all of which shared the same colours. Yes, the coloured mana can be used to pay colourless costs, and so used with non-white spells, but that still means either having a worse single-colour source in a multicolour deck, or effectively using the land as a colourless source and negating the value of it producing White mana.


Now, you can probably guess from the way I judged this, but viriss is the winner.

Sweet!

Continuing with this idea... let's try

For this next challenge, design a land that has Land support

I'm not even sure what that means, but I'm curious to see what you'all create.

Coral Reef

Land :mythic:

Coral Reef comes into play tapped.

You may pay UU to untap Coral Reef.

T: Gain 1 blue mana for each card named Coral Reef in play