By Erik Hane
Everyone hates lands. Ask a player of a trading card game other than Magic what they prefer about it and one answer appears more than any other: their game doesn’t have Magic’s burdensome commitment to manual resource management. You don’t “flood,” in other games, you don’t “get mana-screwed.” And best of all, you don’t have to put a bunch of unexciting cards that don’t really do anything in your deck. The “land drop”—most players’ first action in a turn, usually unremarked upon, treated as obligatory before the real action begins.
This is of course a way of saying that I love lands, actually, and you should too, because more than any other type of card they’re what make Magic special. Channeling mana summoned from the leylines of the earth—it’s druidic almost, or naturalist, or Cambrian.
Learn to love lands like this and obviously you’ll get better at Magic, given the importance of calibrated mana bases that offer you the best chance to curve out and play your spells when you’re hoping to play them. But that’s boring. I don’t want to talk about efficiency, or figuring out exactly how few lands you can get away with running in your deck to make room for whatever you think your “fun” cards are. No, I want to talk about turning lands into a weapon, about taking the foundational resource aspect of Magic and beating opponents to death with it via some very simple cards that for over a decade now the cutting-edge Modern-format metagame still hasn’t managed to make obsolete.
I want to talk about Amulet Titan.