Pointed Discussion

Use this in a deck that uses lots of cheap creatures and spells and you can really slow down your opponents.

I think this is not meant to slow a game down as you can tap all your mana before you play your land for the turn. It is more like an anti counterspell device.

This card is very situational, but I use it in a deck with a well of life and lot's of creatures that get stronger if I'm tapped out. (and downhill charge as surprise). In that deck it works really well and prevents countering quite often.

Lock down the game with this and Winter Orb.

Aaron's Random Card Comment of the Day #17, 10/19/10

I played three copies of this card in the sideboard of my mono-red aggro Standard deck at Worlds 2001. I don’t remember siding it in, and I certainly didn’t test sideboarded games back then, so I can’t really comment on how effective of a card it is. I’m guessing it wasn’t all that great, considering the only other instance I can find of someone using the card in constructed is my co-worker and former teammate Mike Turian, who played the exact same decklist I did at that very tournament. Mike made the Top 8; I did not.

Whether it actually was a good card, it appears to have been created to be one. In the R&D multiverse comments, a developer posed the question: “Is this too good of a control hoser?” No one answered him.

Tectonic Instability was made to hose control decks, specifically counterspell-heavy decks. Those decks thrive when they are making their land drops every turn, countering key spells and using instant card drawing when opportunities present themselves. With Instability in play, playing a land becomes a huge liability, as it will tap you out and leave you unable to counter stuff on your opponent’s turn, giving them a decent window to resolve threats.

If you’ve let your constructed environment drift too far towards countermagic being a default good strategy, then I guess hosers of this power level are fine to print. It’s certainly a heck of a lot more forgiving that Choke, a blunt instrument that has the ability to chase all blue-heavy decks out of an environment, not just counter-based ones. And at three mana, Tectonic Instability is certainly no guarantee to resolve.

What I dislike about it as a hoser is that it isn’t very straightforward. Sure, good players can quickly figure out what it’s for, but a low-level FNM player may never quite grasp the usefulness of the card, even if he is getting blown out by counterspells match after match. I like my counterspell hosers to say “(This / Your stuff) can’t be countered.” Everyone can figure that out and get excited about the prospect of “fighting back.”

I suppose the open-endedness of Tectonic Instability allows it to work with some other cards and against things other than counterspells, such as making sure your opponent is tapped out before trying a game-winning creature enhancement, but those seem quite marginal.

Red: get all your shit out really fast. Then cap it with this while your blue opponent still has a handful of cards he wishes he could play, and your 5/5 dragons are beating him down.

@Aaron: I've been reading your comments on each card and there are a few that I might agree on, and surely because I'm reading as a player not as a designer/developer, but I just had to respond to this one.

The biggest thing that bothers me is that you mention how FNMers might not get it right away and what-not, but I think this is why the card is so good. It is subtle, it rewards players for thinking outside the box, to do a bit of research... Magic may be a game, but when you are looking to get ahead, sometimes actively looking for answers like this card and find it, you feel good. You found a way to stop those annoying decks. The sense of discovery is applicable here. Discovering that gem in the pile of dust, your saving grace. That also has a lot of bearing.

Wasn't one of the intentions of Magic to be a sort of adventure? To give the game a sense of discovery? This plays right into that. I love cards with subtleties like these and I know a lot of people do. I'm not saying to make every card not blatantly obvious, however, I'd rather say "wow, this can be used for this..." than your example of simplicity.

I think simplicity in the game is fine, yet oversimplifying everything will eventually a game of this breadth and depth become another stupid card game.

In fact, recently I discovered that you could use Kazuul, Tyrant of the Cliffs (a little better than Urabrask in other match-ups) to combat ExarchTwin. I mean, WOW.

Just sayin'

@ Aaron:
Don't forget that there are abilities that support this strategy, see: Branded Brawlers. So this card gets in-line with: Stoneshaker Shaman, Citadel of Pain, etc.

What it means to be "tapped out" is obvious for the most players, even for those @ FNM. And once you have taught them to wait to cast their instants until the very last moment, they understand the rest very soon. And the frustration to play against a counter-deck is a moment everyone will have to go through as long as this kind of spell exist.

So even if you've written a reminder on this card (that player can't use tapped lands on any other turn), you wouldn't have changed a thing. So for me, this card is quite perfect. The only thing I would change is the concept of when the mana pool is emptied or to put more effort into explaining this concept to new players.

@CatchoftheCentury: There's a place in the game for cards that you have to discover the value of, but as I understand "hoser" it's "extremely situational card that you board in against a particular matchup, but is useless else". If artifacts are the big thing, then you run artifact hate (Shatter instead of Terror, and as of MBS, Creeping Corrosion). If small cheap flying pests are all the rage, you run Windstorm. They're simple and obvious. If you're staring down the barrel of an FNM full of creatures with flying, you want to be able to go to Gatherer or your card collection and go "This is what I need in my deck". The more complicated cards are great for playing around with, but the simple ones are for filling obvious holes.

This plus Winter Orb plus green's mana creatures equals RUG lockdown.

Is it me, or is Urza kinda being a super massive hypocrite? He didn't just uproot contents. He up and destroyed Argoth, and completely ruined Terisiare.

This card is to be played when the alternative is worse...

One of mono-red's stealth weapons (see also, Blood Moon).

It's really hard to appreciate this card's effect until you play it against a deck that relies heavily on fetchlands. Combo decks in particular are pretty impervious to Wasteland precisely because they sit on uncracked fetchlands, waiting to tutor up the dual lands they need until the turn they go off. If you use Wasteland to destroy their fetchland, they respond by cracking the fetchland; if you wait until they go off, they just tap their fetched Underground Seas for mana immediately. Wasteland: worthless vs. combo.

With an Instability in play, you can actually wasteland their fetchlands! They're screwed: either they let Instability tap the fetchland, in which case you Wasteland their now-unusable fetchland, or they use the fetchland "at instant speed" before Tectonic's ability resolves, in which class you Wasteland the dual land they go fetch.

Their only "safe" option is to fetch a basic land -- which is exactly what you want, because they'll make exactly the types of suboptimal "oh crap I should've gotten an Island instead" plays they were trying to avoid with the fetchland-heavy strategy. Wasteland: all-star status restored.

This card isn't in any Legacy decks' sideboards currently because (1) red doesn't have feasible acceleration to support and (2) red just doesn't have the support cards to build around a clever control trick -- Red Deck Wins has no room for subtlety, Aggro Loam has no room for disruption. But mono-black control should always be thinking about dropping MBC and splashing red specifically because of creative cards like this. In 98% of metagames, this won't help, but if you intuit the metagame at the right time...

Can be brutal against draw go.