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What's going on everyone DNinja here and I’m back with a small rant/question why are lands so expensive? So for context a few weeks back the local game store was holding a commander tournament. Nothing special just some free packs and store credit for the winner. Only rules were no infinite combos and banned cards. So I was putting together a Esika, God of the tree / The prismatic bridge deck. When I was reviewing my order I couldn’t believe it. Roughly 60% of the cost was from the mana base. I was running a 5 color deck mainly going to be using the prismatic bridge as a win con. But the mana base was more then the cards that were in the deck. So my question is why are mana bases so expensive? I know I could have just used budget lands that enter tapped but in a tournament setting that’s not really a option if you want a shot at winning. Also no I was not running fetch lands I can post a mock up of the deck on the site if y’all want me to. That aside I ultimately threw together a Ghalta deck and got knocked out in the second round. But anyway that’s my question/rant hope everyone has a great day D-Ninja out.
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I would have placed this question in the "MTG General Discussion" forum. Pretty normal for modern legal decks, which use 2 or more, colours that the mana base makes up 50% and more of the decks value, if you use competitive lands. The problem is that everybody needs lands. When you look at the metagame (e.g. https://mtgdecks.net/Modern) and analyse the decks, you will quickly find that mono-coloured decks are a minority. 3 out of 26 decks (I only counted for a meta of 1% or higher, below it might be a little different but not much) and 14 out of 26 decks are 3-coloured of higher. Why is that so? Mono coloured decks play very fluid, but have the problem that they are limited to one colour. You can't play every strategy you like or be prepared for everything with one colour, and if you could, the spells would be incredible expensive to cast or have other major drawbacks. 3 colours allows for even a wider approach in strategy, but in my opinion, here it starts to get tricky with the mana base, tough it's doable. A mono coloured deck uses basic lands, no problem. A 2 coloured decks normally doesn't use more than 2-4 basic lands, the rest is dual-, fetch-, or support-lands. 3 coloured decks often use both sets of dual-lands to get a stable mana-base, because there are no competitive 3-coloured lands!, so the demand for those lands is even higher. If you look at (https://www.mtgtop8.com/format?f=MO&meta=220&a=) 8 out of 10 of the most played cards are lands. Last problem is the rarity and availability. Nearly all of the competitive lands used for mana fixing are of rare or mythic rarity. So you have 1 chance per booster to get this card, not including alternative arts or foils. I would have to look at the data of my collection at home, but I'm pretty sure that you don't get much more than 5 of those lands out of a 36 booster brick. So we have a huge demand, and a low availability.
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That makes sense. I’ve rarely ever ventured out of two colors for a competitive scene back in the day. No grad prix or anything just local card shops.
The very first deck I played at a game store was mono white humans, followed by black/ red vampires. But I started to note down prices of decks, before adding special lands. This showed that most mana bases for two modern legal coloured decks I built made about 50% of the decks total value. The first thing, that came to my mind when reading your question, was rarity, and the quick evaluation from some of my old decks and the 2 linked sites seemed to fortify my assumption. Even many mono coloured decks today will want to play some special lands, like fetchlands or something that boosts you mana, manlands, and so on.
Demand. Not every deck needs path to exile, but every deck needs lands. Not only that, but finely tuned mana bases require very specific lands, so those are the ones that are the most expensive.Although these days paper magic prices are determined by EDH more than any other format at the moment.
That is so true. I remember it was so cheap when I started playing commander then it was like overnight everything jumped.
Yeah, cards like Rhystic Study were like, 4 dollars when Theros and Born of the Gods was released. Then EDH slowly gained popularity and now they're around 30-40 dollars depending on condition.
Same thing with cyclonic rift. I got a play set for 5 then it jumped to 20 apiece.
Yeah. These days whenever I see something that says "Whenever a player does X thing" I pick a few up. I got a few smothering tithes super early thanks to that.
Same thing with lands like Field of the Dead. I picked up foils for 5 a piece when m20 first dropped.
I missed the boat on that one lol
Any rare or mythic that says "Each Player" or "Each Opponent" is worth looking at these days thanks to EDH.
I’ll keep that in mind when I start investing again.