Pointed Discussion

"Sir, reports from the beaches have just come in."
"What do they say, Lieutenant?"
"They say that the storage of sand is going smoothly, and they are ready to deliver at a moment's notice."
Yeah...not this week. Let's go with more sand, and see where we are in a week."
"Understood, sir."

Brilliant.

This original group of storage lands got played as 1- or 2-ofs in a lot of decks, and proved to be a good way to strike a big late-game blow in many cases. However, blue was among the colours with the least need of this; black and red are the kings of this type of "B" plan. Still, as a way to drop a creature late while still leaving counter mana open, this guy definitely had its uses.

At least from The Dark on, blue got in pretty much every set a massive creature with a ridicullously large casting cost, many with 4 blue as part of the cost. The Silos were useful for getting these giants into play.

This land has -0/-1 against frisbees.

Crap! I didn't know this was a rare and traded my whole playset away. The expansion symbol was black not gold.

The problem with lands like this and their potential combinations with Doubling Season / Gilder Bairn or Proliferate is that you still have to spend mana to get mana. Usually, getting a net gain isn't worth it unless you have an cost worth paying.

But if you're patient, I suppose it wouldn't be bad.

Decent card if for no other reason than it doesn't require any input (other than leaving it tapped) to charge it up.

Made for a Proliferating control deck with Fatties. 4/5

I like the card. One reason is nostalgia. Fallen Empires was new when I started playing, and I had one of these sand silo cards. Another reason is the art. It seems so peaceful somehow. A nice sandy beach with some mysterious sand-piles. Not, like on many other cards, something getting killed or burned or slaughtering something else or being at war or not. Just a beach with some sand piles, that in mysterious ways generate mana, and tell a tiny part of a story about a plane. :)

The card by itself can be ok for Commander or other slow multiplayer formats, I guess. Most storage lands require mana to do their thing. This one doesn't. It is very very slow though.

It does like to be comboed with paradox haze though. With two of them in play, this land already generates three mana a turn.

Its slow, but in control or turbo fog, it can help give some reach for an expensive win condition.

This is part of a cycle of "storage lands" from Fallen Empires which are all plagued by their slow, slow speed. At a time when land destruction was so rampant and cheap, this could easily set you back very very far. To give you some idea of how slow these lands are, note that they all enter the battlefield tapped, and then require you to tap to remove counters. To get more benefit than a simple Island, you'd need to invest 4(!) turns. Compare this to the difficult-to-pronounce Svyelunite Temple, and that cycle of lands, from the same set, which provide a little optional burst after they come into play tapped.

However, this one is arguably more playable than its contemporaries, because of the nature of blue decks in those days to grind the game out many turns. However, its design prevents it from being used unless you leave it untapped, which prevents it from getting more counters. This is obviously not a great fit in a deck running countermagic, though it might have more use powering out Deep Spawn and the like.

Here's the storage land cycle for the curious:

: Bottomless Vault
: Sand Silos
: Hollow Trees
: Dwarven Hold
: Icatian Store