Land Designs

The first thing that came to mind was the 'official' printing of Barry's Land.

Barry's Observatory
Land - Cloud
~ enters the battlefield tapped.
When ~ enters the battlefield, you may sacrifice five Clouds. If you do, create a 4/4 colorless Elemental creature token with flying.
: Add .
"When the five currents align, call for a Storm-Namer."

Card takes various inspirations from other weather themed things like Air Elemental and how major storms tend to get human names. Intentionally meant to be harder to exploit than Field of the Dead, Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle, and Westvale Abbey - if you want to exploit this card, you'll have to run a notable mass of subpar lands in your deck, but the payoff you get is less conditional if you do.

Ramunap Tower
Land - Desert Tower
: Add .
Whenever you tap a Mine to produce mana, you may pay 2 life. If you do, add one mana of any color.

I thought that thing would stand near the Lazotep mines, so it might make sense.
Originally I did 1 life for , but I thought this would be neater and still less broken.
It kind of feels too much of an advantage to make this a Desert, yet the flavor kind of dictates it is. Als hooray for more busted tron lands.

Thanks for the win thaneofglamis!

Next: Show me a land that's designed with a specific format in mind.
Can be anything from draft to planechase; from commander to any format you can come up with.

Sinister Lair
Land - Lair
Add .
, , Sacrifice ~: Look at the top card of your scheme deck. You may reveal it and set in motion.
"Behold, my newest diabolical plot!"

Romina, Forum of Philosophers
Legendary Land
~ enters the battlefield tapped.
: All players add . You gain life equal to the amount of unspent mana lost this phase.
"Let the prophets congregate and let us profit." -Merri, Scroll Merchant



I don't like it when a card is only possible to be used in one environment. So I made one that profits from multiplayer. And mostly commander, as infinite mana is something that happens with combo decks often enough, so you can't just do it willynilly with this in play.

Thanks!

WoTC has generally indicated they want to keep fetchlands out of more recent formats, as indicated by them banning them on Pioneer's release and releasing Brainstorm into Historic. Your next challenge is to design a land that comes into play untapped and efficiently fixes your mana without using mana symbols.

How you interpret "efficiently" is up to you, but I'm not exactly interested in seeing the 30th variation on Survivors' Encampment, so please keep that in mind. I would also advise against format-specific designs like Command Tower as part of "spirit" of fetchlands is being useful across almost every Magic format they are legal in.

Good luck!

Gateway to Lacking
Land 
: Add .
, : Add two mana of any color not among colored permanents you control.

Maybe it could add 2 mana, since this seems a worsened version of Unknown Shores.

It's been over 2 weeks and I might not get another good chance to judge soon so I'm going to be closing this and judging. Really strong entries all around.

MaiApologies (She/Her) - This is a very neat take on colorfixing that doesn't cause too much memory issues, makes you look at existing lands in a new way, and doesn't step too hard on any existing designs that came before. I think it's a great way to promote colorless matters and I would like this to see print.

viriss - Getting some Chrome Mox vibes from this card except as a land drop which I think is interesting. You present the interesting decision of getting rid of a less useful card to have no fixing or getting rid of a more useful multicolor card to fix your mana. I like that you are able to recover the card as well later on as that helps promotes interesting play vs. discard decks.

melono - Evolving Wilds but doubled up, which I find surprisingly clever. It gives this kind of design a landfall-focused edge and doesn't promote excessively running duals, which I think would probably cause it to end up like Prismatic Vista and have it support snow decks as well. Stifle is pretty nasty against these types of effects especially since it can't do anything on its own so I think this is fair.

Nonagon Infinity - A filter land that promotes playing a variety of colors. I think this is interesting because despite encouraging a multicolor deck it also wants you to run as many single-colored cards as possible, or sneak in other colors via abilities or alternate casting costs.

Giraculum - I find it extremely interesting that unlike Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth, this doesn't fix itself, which means that the fixing is not so perfect as it might appear. For example, you can't play a White one-drop if this is your only land. I feel like this could be a cycle that enables landwalk shenanigans and fills in as alternatives to existing dual lands while being a bit riskier and more demanding to work properly - at the very least, I think a full cycle of these would cause some great debates over whether these, Shocklands, or Triomes are your fetch choice(s) of pick in Modern. Possibly one of my favorite takes on a dual land cycle that I've seen in a while, partially because it manages to successfully compete with existing dual cycles without trampling on them.

Jartis - Turns a Llanowar Elves into a Bird of Paradise functionally, which I think is cool. That said mana dorks generally stay in these days (with the occasional bizarre conditional one-off in another color like Chandra's Embercat) so I'm not sure how much this actually helps people feel incentivized to efficiently colorfix. I feel like the typical cases this would be considered in are usually answered by either Birds of Paradise or Noble Hierarch so I think this would mostly supplement multicolor Green decks with mana dorks to make them more consistent. It's still a good use of the card, I'm just not sure how broad/narrow you intended it to be. I did think it should be though, mana dorks are only a small chunk of Green's part of a set typically and thus this card feels like it'd uselessly flood the common slot in draft a lot.

1st: Giraculum - You successfully managed to pitch a whole new cycle of dual lands to me without using mana symbols or fetchland design. Well done.
2nd: MaiApologies (She/Her) - I think this is a really creative take on manafixing that promotes its own colorless-matters archetype without feeling blatantly forced to be about either.
3rd: Nonagon Infinity - Acts as good fixing in the stages it needs to be and implicitly promotes a sort of multicolor playstyle that doesn't generally get talked about. I'd brew it.

Witherbloom Treetops
Land
, Pay 1 life: Add .
, , Sacrifice Witherbloom Treetops: Put X +1/+1 counters on target crreature, where X is the ammount of life you’ve lost this turn.
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Witherbloom Bog
Land
, Pay 1 life: Add .
, , Sacrifice Witherbloom Bog: Gain ilfe equal to the ammount of life you’ve lost this turn.

Well, that's a weird way to win. Thanks!

Next challenge: Show me a land that uses the word copy somewhere on the card.