Subject: EX: City of Traitors Date: 11 Jun 98 18:52:09 +0100 From: "David Eastman" To: fkusumot@ix.netcom.com City of Traitors, Land, T: Add 2 to your mana pool. If you play a land, sacrifice City of Traitors. A smile has appeared on the lips of the Land Destruction mages. Why so? Is this card any better than Ancient Tombs or Crystel Vein? Certainly. In the mainly red LD game, Stone rain, Dwarven Miner and perhaps Orcish Settler provide the meat of LD. These require one red mana, and two or more colourless mana to get going. Add a Hammer and/or Well of Knowledge to push land advantage, a finisher creature and a few disks and you have a deck. The poor Aftershock may also feature in a heavy red variant. In Exodus Flowstone Flood and Ravenous Baboons are superior 4 mana additions. The killer for LD is the late 3rd mana: Mana curve: 1,2,2,3 For example: I have e two mountains in my hand, but don't pick up another mountain till turn four. Worse, I have two Stone Rains waiting to strike. I don't get a hit in until turn four, which is really too late. Now repeat this hand, except with one City of Traitors for a mountain instead: Mana curve: 1,3,3,.. Not only do I get a second turn LD (always nice), I get to do a third turn LD too. I can chose to blow the City on turn four to give me a brief four mana spike when the second mountain shows, depending on what I topdeck. You can see from this example that Crystal Vein isn't a useful comparison. Ancient Tombs would cost 6 damage if used in a similar way. This is way too much for a deck that does not win by pure speed. So what about the down side? If I get two Cities and no mountain start, I have got a slightly worse situation than with other non-basic lands because of the need to place a non-city land before getting the best use out of the city. This is where Fire Diamonds should come into their own.. A late City can be used as a useful mana boost in exactly the same way as the Tombs can, probably for a large Orcish settlement or an extra card from the Well. Here is a fairly simple example deck: 4 Stone Rain 4 Incinerate 4 Shock 3 Flowstone Flood 2 Hammer Of Bogarden 2 Shattering Pulse 4 Orcish Settelers 3 Dwarven Miners 2 Flowstone Helion 2 Ravenous Baboons 3 Well of Knowledge 2 Nevinyrrals Disk 2 Fire Diamonds 2 Quicksand 3 City of Traitors 18 Mountains I would reckon 4 Cities may be risky - primarily as increasing the number of Diamonds is counterproductive when using a Disk. Monsterous Hounds may be a very good card in this deck if blocking was possible without the land advantage. As always, a real LD deck is about mana advantage and Exodus gives a fair number of tools to the keen player.