I'm in the middle of having a one-sided argument with my playgroup about playing Evolving Wilds in M15 Limited. My argument is that a) the deck thinning is pointless, b) the tempo hit is relevant unless it's in your opening hand bc you have to be able to beat Charging Rhino in this format, c) it gets aggressively worse as the game goes on, d) it makes lower-curved creature spells with multiple mana symbol requirements difficult to cast on curve.

I seem to be the only one who feels this way though, so I wanted to know what you guys thought. Is Evolving Wilds a card you always play via 8/8/1?

The power of mana fixing significantly outweighs any tempo hit it might give you. It lets you cast your multiple-mana-symbol weenies instead of them rotting in your hand because you hit all the wrong colors. It lets you splash for game-winning bombs. It lets you keep otherwise unkeepable hands and saves you from randomly losing to mana screw. I would always play Evolving Wilds, period.

It's a little less effective than having an on-colour EtBT dual-land. The land always enters the battlefield tapped, it's always the land you need, and is vitally important in a 3-colour draft deck. However, the entering the battlefield tapped is a major cost, and the card gets significantly worse in multiples due to the possibility of using both of them right at the start. If you would take a tempo hit to have a Guildgate (ex, Golgari Guildgate) in your deck, then this makes just about the same amount of sense.

The biggest problem with the card is that once you use it, it'll only ever tap for that one colour, which is where Guildgates are superior. A Selesnyan Guildgate on turn 1 followed by a Forest on turn lets you cast anything worth; , , , , or . An Evolving Wilds turn 1 sac'd for a Plains lets you cast everything in that list EXCEPT . You can extend this to 3 mana pretty well too.

But, the value of Evolving Wilds is that it works this way in ANY two-colour deck, whereas you need a Selesnyan Guildgate to really fit in a white and green deck (a Golgari Guildgate will just be worse than running a Forest in that case). You do pay some quality for the assurance of use.

Generally speaking, unless the deck I'm building is fast enough to be a 16-land deck, I'll always toss in Evolving Wilds just to make sure I get the right mix, as the game is likely to go long enough that access to appropriate mana is often more important than hitting the curve precisely on curve each time.

I will include 2 Evolving Wilds in any multi-colored deck without hesitation, never getting color screwed is much more important to me than lands entering the battlefield untapped. Also, unless you have two in hand, you can almost always sequence your plays so Evolving Wilds makes you miss your least important land drop.

I was wondering if it's OK to play 3 or 4 in a 3 color deck? Is there actually a limit? I guess 8 would be too many!

I would always play 1 and almost always play 2. I guess in some very fast RW or RB deck (16) lands you would play 0. Another situation where you might play 17 lands and no wilds would be if you had 4 or 5 1 drops (Rats or Mystics in particular, but maybe a goblin or cathar as well).

Note that you might need or to beat charging rhino in the first place.

I do agree that the deck thinning is not significant.

This. I'd rather have Evolving Wilds be my land drop then have to topdeck the right land to play my spell.

~SE++

I've gotta agree with the consensus (not that the opinion of some random new poster like me much matters). It's just so often that you play it at a time where it doesn't affect your tempo at all. It doesn't get "aggressively" worse with time, the only turns of the game it can really hurt are if you're forced to play it on, say, Turn 2 or 3. But again, that requires you keeping a land-light hand and then drawing into it. Those situations don't come up often enough to scare me away from the fixing and filtering it offers. If I'm splashing, I really want one or two of these. If I'm not, I'm still glad to take it as a mid-pick.

I would think before playing Evolving Wilds. It's by no means an automatic inclusion.

I would never play it in a mana-hungry deck. Wilds actually lower your probability of getting up to six mana, so no way. Nissa's Expedition and the Elf are your friends there.

The other side of this coin is that I would play it in an low-curve, aggro deck. Of course, such a deck is either monocolored, or without double-color mana symbols, and you can go to something like 8-7-1, or even 7-7-2. This is the situation where you want the deck thinning. I'm not sure such an animal exists in M15, though.

I might play it in a midrange deck if I was low on playables. But that is a disaster anyway, a passable draft deck should have something like 25 or more playables.

So please do pick this high, and leave the good cards to me

Interesting, everyone thanks for your responses and not being derisive about it too! (yay NGA forums!)

I'm more with Zlehtnoba in this one; I have to have a particular reason to be playing Wilds.

My friend just posted a 3-0 double-wilds deck in our google group thread as an "IN YOUR FACE" thing... but he had triple Welkin Tern and double Raise the Alarm and triple Seraph of the Masses and double white paragon and double Triplicate Spirits etc. and my only thought was how pointless the wilds were in a deck that would've 3-0'd anyway, and how his worse vapor snags and peel from reality and other tempo spells really helped smooth any awkward draws or tempo losses he would've had playing wilds anyway.

However, maybe I just need to play more than 3-4 two-drops in my draft decks. I mean, I used to play all-in aggro, but backed off of it the past year. This is Convoke season, so low-curve playables all turning into mana dorks is kinda greedy awesome, and wilds doesn't disrupt that strategy in the least.

I don't see how this slows you down to getting 6 mana though, as you yourself said that "the deck thinning isn't important". Saying that it is important is sort of the opposite

I stand by my statement that it's around the same power as a Guildgate, and if you'd take the tempo hit from that, you're probably the type of deck that'll take the tempo hit from this too. Turn 1 Guildgate into 2 & 3-drops with double-mana requirements on turns 2 and 3 is a strong play. Turn 1 Guildgate into Turn 2 Guildgate into 2 & 3 mana drops on turns 3 and 4 is not as strong as play, but potentially still good. Turn 1 and 2 land-drops, into turn 3 Guildgate that you just drew, into turn 4 2-drop because you needed that other colour, is very weak.

Where did anyone say both of these?

I figured that's what you meant by,


And then you said you agreed with,

Wilds is not a guildgate though, that's a fallacy ignoring the format. This is not a multi-colored format, and wilds doesn't fix for a deck. You can argue a guildgate is two .5 lands, so it makes itself basically like 1 land, aka makes up for the tempo loss. A wilds is more like .3 of a land.

I wasn't agreeing with Z's concept of deck-thinning in that it's always good. I was agreeing that in his very narrow and possibly impossible example it would be good, because an aggro deck with a low curve needs to draw spells. Mostly I was agreeing that it wasn't an auto-include.

There also seems to be a lot of people arguing wilds as if it is always in your opening hand or you first two draws. The chances of that are incredibly slim. I look at it like I look at every card: when is it good? Wilds, for example:

1. Good in the beginning game if you're low-curve
2. Good in the beginning game when you have steep color requirements
3. OK in the middle game if you're splashing
4. Meh in the late game if you're splashing

This is by no means an auto-include card.

I would very much agree with that assessment. I'd likely change to "Good in the middle game if you have steep color requirements" though, as I can't count how many games I've gotten 1 land of one colour, and 4 or even 5 of the other. But, yes, it is certainly not an auto-include, though a great majority of Limited decks will be improved by have one. I wouldn't want to run 3 in a Limited deck though, as that feels like it's asking for lots of tempo-trouble, unless I really had to.

And, yeah, I'd rate it as two .4's of a land for a total of .8. Guildgates are .9's. Like I mentioned in my original post, they are slightly worse than on-colour Guildgates, but also better than Guildgates in another sense because they're far better than an off-colour Guildgate and are thus much easier to acquire and use.

I'm afraid I lost the two of you when you started discussing fractional land theory. Evolving Wilds doesn't make .3 or .8 of a mana, it makes 1.0 of a mana. Having the ability to produce different colors of mana doesn't somehow make a land worth less than a land. What metric are you using, exactly, to calculate the land-ness coefficient of these cards?

Here is my thought process:

- Evolving Wilds gives you the color of mana you need the most. This is good, because it helps you to cast your spells.
- Evolving Wilds enters the battlefield tapped. This is bad, because you can cast less things on that one turn.
- If you don't have the color of your mana you need the most, you have to wait and hope you draw a land of the right color. The waiting period ranges from "one turn" to "until you lose."
- Waiting one turn is better than waiting an indefinite number of turns that may end up costing you the game.
- You often have turns where you don't spend all your mana. At these times, Evolving Wilds's drawback is negligible.
- Evolving Wilds doesn't take up a spell slot.
- Therefore, play Evolving Wilds.

This isn't rocket science.

Basically I'm using this one: http://www.channelfireball.com/articles ... ur-spells/

Frank here argues fetches are .5 of a land, however wilds is worse than that because of the tempo loss, so it is at least less than .5

I'm fudging the math because I have two degrees in English, what can I say.

Also, there's no need to say dickish things like "this isn't rocket science," particularly since, as evinced by Frank's article, it's much more complicated than your oversimplification.

Pretty sure article says fetches count for full lands unless heavy color commitments.
And even then it's not half.

That is not what he said:



English is not statistics.


I apologize if that came off as a personal attack. But I still believe that you are strongly overvaluing tempo in M15 draft, I don't understand how correlating fractional values to lands helps in this discussion, and I would like you to point out how you think my analysis is oversimplified.

(I was using rstnme's number as an assumption of tempo-to-fixing metrics, and if Guildgates were rated at that particular number, with 1 being a perfect fixing land like Taiga and 0 being perfectly not-fixing land like Maze's End in a deck with no guildgates, then an Evolving Wilds would rate slightly below whatever the Guildgate was set at.)