Spoiler Highlight: Adventure Lands and the Mana System Dilemma

Being a pioneer in something often means that you need to constantly innovate and improve to stay relevant. It's natural that, over the years, others will take the concepts, ideas, and innovations that you created and improve them, adapt them, and make them more appealing to new audiences and demographics as years, or decades, go by.

When creating Magic: The Gathering, Richard Garfield gave birth to a system of resources known as Mana. Players need mana to cast spells and Lands generate mana, so you need to balance the amount of spells and lands to have, in a deck of 60 or more cards, a consistent chance of drawing a number of lands that support the mana value of your cards.

As should have been evident since the first tournament, the game's resource system can lead to some anti-play games: lands may not come, or may come in excess, or you may fail to sequence spells and lands at the right time.

This element has become known as variance: the possibility that because of the randomness, you will draw the wrong cards and lose the game due to something that some call bad luck. Some argue that Magic is not about variance: the decision to keep that hand was yours, therefore, the outcome of it is also your responsibility. This makes sense, but it doesn't change the fact that the game has this flaw.

Flaw, however, was not always the term used: for years, the land factor in Magic was considered — and still is — a feature of the game. What has changed is not that Magic has become worse because of the mana system, but that other games that have become popular in recent years have sought to adapt the biggest problem that the card game proposed at its origin: resource management.

There is a rule that all modern card games try to exercise, inspired by the very philosophy of matches that Magic adopts today: when two players sit at the table with their decks, there must be a game. And in the case of these TCGs, the resource system cannot prevent a game from taking place. There are three specific examples that we can consider:

Lorcana has a mana system similar to Magic's: Inkables are cards that, in addition to working for other purposes, can be revealed and played face down to generate resources to play other cards.

One Piece TCG, which was one of the best-selling card games of 2024, uses the DON!! system. In it, lands are separate from the main deck and the player receives a specific amount of them each turn — these can be used to play cards, or increase the attack of their characters. In part, this was the same system adopted by Legends of Runeterra back in 2020.

Flesh and Blood, by Legends Story Studios, mixes action cards with resources: weaker versions of cards generate more resources while stronger versions generate fewer, ensuring a balance between how each deck uses them, while its “rotating” hand system (each player draws four cards at the end of their turn while putting cards used as resources on the bottom of their deck) ensures that players always have some action in the game.

Of these three, Flesh and Blood stands out, not because its system is more innovative compared to the others, but because this card game managed to prove legally to Germany that it is not a game of chance. It may seem obvious to those involved in TCGs, but it isn't: variance, a flaw in the Mana system, can categorize a card game as gambling — the LSS has been able to prove with facts that its games are entirely based on the skill of its players.

It is therefore clear that Magic: The Gathering's mana system may eventually need to change to keep up with the competition. But it is not possible to change the rules, much less the game configuration, after 30 years. It is necessary to think about the future, and make additions that respect its roots while mitigating the biggest problem that its system presents to new audiences.

In this case, perhaps Adventure Lands are the right design to start cycles to mitigate these problems while respecting their roots, but like Channel Lands before them, there are risks and benefits to attaching Adventures to a card type that is essential for any deck to function.

Utility lands have been around in Magic since Alpha: Strip Mine could already be categorized in this role. Since that time, they have always had a concession to be used, whether it was generating colorless mana, entering tapped, or having any condition in between that made them useful as lands while still being able to perform another action in the game.

The most common design for these cards came from Urza Block, the Manlands. They enter tapped without any other more complicated conditions, such as Kjeldoran Outpost, or without the possibility of taking away access to the player's colored mana, and as a bonus, offered one more action in the game as the game went on. We saw this model used all the time.

With each cycle, Magic tried to recreate the way lands were played to give them more actions in the game. The color system already makes the idea of ​​diversifying untapped duals is already very complex so as not to “lose a turn”: playing a Battlefield Forge, by nature, is already a “bonus” compared to including a Plains and a Mountain in its place.

The drawback has alternated over time: from entering tapped, to costing life, having a higher activation cost, requiring specific lands to function or only entering untapped in the first turns of the game, and even generating mana for only one card type — all of them try, in some way, to bring balance between still requiring basic lands and two in a list without harming the number of actions in the game, mitigating the problems of drawing too many lands without necessarily reducing the importance of balancing your mana base with the spells you want to play.

But as the card game niche progresses, and as it becomes clearer that Magic's mana system may eventually become its Achilles' heel, we'll likely see more situations where action cards intertwine with mana access.

The best examples of these cases are from recent cycles: the Double-Faced Cards from Zendikar Rising and Modern Horizons III, the Channel Lands from Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty, and the new Adventure Lands from Final Fantasy.

Double-Faced (or MDFCs) were perhaps one of the most interesting takes for mixing effects and mana into one resource: they played like spells, but could be used as lands if necessary. But there are two problems with them: the Duress factor — essentially, a targeted discard on the first turn could be as good as a Strip Mine — and the way these cards allow combos with effects that care about revealing lands, like Undercity Informer and Goblin Charbelcher. The idea is excellent, but in practice, it presents too many risks.

The Channel Lands try another philosophical line: since they are Legendary, playing with many copies of them means risking not having mana available every turn, since sequencing them into play is the equivalent of losing a land or using your land drop for the turn as a Lotus Petal.

Their abilities, however, are at the right cost and are flexible enough to deserve slots in any deck that can support them as one-ofs. In some cases, like Boseiju, Who Endures, they are so efficient that lists can include two, or even three copies of them to deal with hate or specific Metagames.

The fact that they are abilities is the major issue with them. There are very few effects that counter abilities in Magic, and each of the Channel Lands, while balanced by being Legendary, are difficult to interact with and create circumstances where there is little punishment for using them, outside a few specific hates like Blood Moon or Sunspine Lynx.

The new Adventure Lands addressed both of these problems. Most of them have a very high mana value to cast on the Adventure side, and it's not necessary for all of them to always have those costs, but it also doesn't seem plausible to have a Shock on a land costing — there needs to be some drawback in choosing it over a spell.

Because they are Land type, they are not targets for Duress and the like, and they are not difficult to interact with, since the Adventure is cast, creating possibilities to respond with Counterspells and even end up removing the land from the player's turn with them. They also create certain dilemmas when building your lists: although not all of them need to enter tapped in the future, it is natural that most of them have this “cost” to compensate for the double function.

On the other hand, the same Duress factor that makes DFCs a bad option to mitigate variance is a problem when you cannot interact with cards from your opponent's hand. Let's say that one day an Adventure Land comes out with a Terminate or equivalent. If your deck, for some reason, is a creature-based combo, you can no longer rely on Thoughtseize and other targeted discards to deal with them, and you're left to rely on your opponent to play that land to get rid of the removal.

There's also a debate to be had about how much value Adventure Lands could bring if cast frequently. Virtually every Adventure you play is a two-for-one: the Adventure's spell and the original card have distinct effects, and that's what made cards like Bonecrusher Giant staples for so long — if put into more lands, it means that at a certain point on the match, you're not deciding whether to play spells or guarantee your land drop, but rather playing spells while guaranteeing the next land.

This change would be a game-changer for all structures in the game. While formats like Modern and Legacy probably wouldn't be affected as much at first, the way Standard is played would change forever, and there would be a point where power creep would push these cards into rotation. Magic would become even more about having two-for-one cards, not just permanents, as it is today, but also lands that would now double in function.

So unless Magic wants to permanently change its very structure of how it plays and builds lists—and they had that opportunity with Companions in Ikoria and chose not to—the game needs to keep the costs and drawbacks of any lands they release. Be they Channel Lands, Adventures, or even classic utility lands like Manlands.

While newer games have tweaked the mana system in different ways, Magic pioneered the complexity of roles, turns, rules, abilities, and other elements that permeate card game culture today. That's part of its charm.

Games like Flesh and Blood are, in fact, much better at mitigating variance and putting player decisions at the center of the game. Both because of its resource system and because it has, under normal conditions, far fewer power play lines than most other TCGs. It certainly has an easier time being recognized as a skill game, but that quality doesn't negate the charm and quality of other systems.

Pokémon TCG, for example, has anti-game issues that can be as frustrating as not buying the third land for eight turns in a row: the Prize system can also be flawed, the lack of Mulligan if there is a basic Pokémon in hand is a "flaw" for Magic players, but none of these factors prevent it from attracting huge numbers of participants in competitive events.

Magic follows the same path. There is a thirty-year tradition being maintained. Even though so many things have changed in recent years, there are still key elements that define it, and the mana system is certainly the most important of them.

Perhaps it will indeed become dated at some point and the design and testing team will need to rethink the way to build mana bases in the future, but few things are as inherent to Magic as the famous question: "can I cut a land from my list?" — and in the last three decades, of all things, the game's system continues to work as it was intended.