Pointed Discussion

Land Destruction at its finest... and vanillaist...

You can put this in any Red deck. It never fails to be useful.

How many players have cursed because of this card over the years?

Aaron’s Random Card Comment of the Day #58, 1/19/11

Yes, I know this entry is out of order numerically. That's what happens when I switch between my home and work machines. Anyway...

As much as this card was a part of the first several years of Magic, R&D really doesn't like it any more. Trust me, I tried putting it in some number of recent Core Sets--you know, poke the bear and all that--and it never works out. Blowing up lands for the sake of preventing spells from being cast is pretty frustrating.

I know how it all works. I won a fair bit of money playing mana-denial decks featuring obnoxious stuff like Rishadan Port and Plow Under. I've had opponents scoop without ever casting a spell. At that particular point in time, that type of play actually felt noble because if you let the top-tier decks in Standard get to four or five lands, they'd start casting things like Replenish, Opposition, Yawgmoth's Bargain, or Treachery--things that were actually less enjoyable than having all your lands blown up.

Nowadays we try to engineer things such that casting four- and five-mana spells is actually noble and fair, and having early, consistent land destruction invalidate all of it. Of course, we want to make cool nonbasic lands like Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle and understand there needs to be ways to destroy them, so we generally keep the LD spells at four mana and up.

The main reason I keep wanting to reprint Stone Rain is not because I look forward to a new age of Ponza decks, but becuase I think the line "Destroy target land" full stop is beautiful and deserves to be on a Core Set Magic card. For now, we're kind of hung up on what that card should cost.

I joined Wizards of the Coast in March of 2007. 10th Edition was already at the printers, but I hadn't seen it yet. My first weekend there was a crash course of the next several months of Magic -- here's Future Sight! Here's Lorwyn! Here's 10th Edition! -- and I'm flipping through and I notice that Stone Rain was gone. Wait, Stone Rain was gone?!

That Monday, my second week in the pit, I got into a heated discussion about how horrible it was that Stone Rain was being killed from Magic. "Shouldn't Red have the ability to be control, too?" I was so very sure that I was right.

I wasn't right. Stone Rain can't cost three mana -- because it will always be able to be cast on turn 2 with green's help. And when I Stone Rain your only land, you can't possibly be having fun.

WotC has taken several steps towards making usable Land Destruction since then -- Fulminator Mage is as close to "powerful" as you are likely to see, and even he is out of Standard for a while now.

Modern Land Destruction spells now allow your opponent to reasonably have had at least 3 lands in play. See things like Poison The Well, Melt Terrain, Tectonic Edge. I believe that you can do it two other ways: Heavily stamp this card as monored -- Stone Rain at RRR can't really hurt Magic, can it? -- or you can have it target nonbasic lands. 2R, Sorcery, Destroy target nonbasic land

Usually fails to be useful in a multiplayer free-for-all, actually.

Funny to read those WoTC comments when this is the most reprinted Alpha card with nineteen reprints. Giant Growth has only eighteen reprints.

But then again GG will be reprinted many more times when it seems that SR is dead as a Dodo.

Andrea2s1 hit the nail on the head. is the best possible cost for this effect if you want to balance fairness and 'playability'.

For God's sake, WOTC, just reprint this freaking card.
I know that Mark Rosewater has said Power creep isn't real and all that jazz (which is so stupid a statement it hurts), but you have a deck like Tempered Steel running around and doing major damage to people... and the deck doesn't ever even want to have to play a 4th land.

The point is that Stone rain has never been very good as a weak subtheme and only used at all in a fairly dedicated LD deck.

Well... you couldn't even play such a deck nowadays.

Thanks to your stupid Titans on the high end, the other spectrum has to be ABSURDLY fast beatdown decks (or a combo deck that can win on turn 4 or whatever). A card like Stone Rain just won't ever even work at all in such a format. This would have been the perfect time to bring back Stone Rain.

@ Aaron:
Basically, land destruction is up-to-par with counterspell decks, black discard decks, the old blue land-bounce decks or black destruction decks. R&D tried to increase the cost for counterspells for just a few editions (see Cancel), only to reprint the second most powerful counterspell: Mana Leak. Hymn to Tourach is gone, as well as Boomerang.

But what still is the same, are the destruction spells. And if I look at the standard top 8 decklists, only to see a deck full of destruction spells and a few planeswalkers, I wonder if land destruction is really such much awful in comparison to a "I have more destruction spells than you have creatures" deck. In the end, it didn't matter if I was able to cast it, just to see it being destroyed or never been able to cast it.

Another problem in Magic is the overpowered nature of mana-acceleration and the restriction to only a few colors, since a turn 1 acceleration card makes it possible to cast the Stone Rain on turn 2. And if you're going first, things start to get ugly.

I would distribute mana AND card acceleration to every color more evenly. Then, a land destruction spell would only negate the increase and reduce it to the "normal" level. If you then keep the number of alternatives low enough, a Stone Rain would be a perfect reprint card.

BTW:
I like the fact that the casting cost is , since I see a distinction between red as a fiery color, requiring a lot of mana and red as the color of stone, symboled by a high amount of colorless mana. That's one reason, why I like Earthquake, but would change Fireball into a spell with casting cost of and multikicker , dealing 1 damage to any target.

I think that land destruction should be a little slow down from Stone Rain to prevent some crazy deck type like permission and discard. Even worse you can always draw a card each turn (a new threat, a new spell to cast), but you can't recover from land destruction so easily. However I think that punish non-basic land should the way to go. The game can hinder those 300€/$ deck full of double land of some sort and give the budget (or new) player some tools to have a chance... Also a reason why the Primeval Titan should read "basic land". Like the non-budget player weren't incentivated enough... in the same vein they could bring Ruination back!
Finally, in this way they give to basic lands, the backbone of Magic, a heavier role in the game.

So my idea is, like the Andrea2s1's one:
{2}{R}
Sorcery
Destroy target non-basic land

3.5/5

Has no one at R&D seriously ever thought of THIS as an alternative?

Stone Flood
Sorcery, 3R
Destroy target land. Stone Flood deals 1 damage to each creature the land's controller controls.

I mean, Stone Rain's original art shows people being damaged! Seriously, someone MUST have had this idea; why was the card never printed? Instead we get Seismic Spike, a card that I tried so VERY hard to like for its awesome flavor, but which just plain wasn't ever even remotely usable (at least not back when there was mana burn!).

Originally posted 06/05/11.
EDIT - Dark Ascension shows something close to what I was proposing in Scorch the Fields, though it's tribe-specific and overpriced.

Hate rated.
Hell why not reprint Sinkhole.
They reprinted Tarmogoyf.

Very bad. You just spent three mana in your main phase to play a sorcery card to trade with a card your opponent played for FREE. Loses out on Mana Advantage and doesn't net you any card advantage.

-Swag_Crow

This isn't on the same level as Counterspell or Lightning Bolt. Right now in Standard we have devotion decks running around with Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx and Mutavault with no sufficient answer. Literally nobody runs Demolish in their sideboard, not even mono-red.

R/G destruction builds that blow up turn 1 land drops waste two turns accelerating to a non-game-ending removal spell. Plenty of defenses and answers are available for cheaper, the most obvious being not to keep a 1-land hand.

If you reduce SR to non-basic, you make it ineffective against land auras like Chained to the Rocks and Underworld Connections. Reddening the casting cost only punishes fair multi-color decks who need an answer to busted lands. Without a suite of land frustration available this card is entirely fair and deserves a reprint.