by Elton Gahr

Created on: October 30, 2009

No matter how well you balance your land it seems like you always need a few more of one color and a few less of another. This becomes even more important when you have specialty lands that have abilities or skills. But there is very little you can do about that. Even cards that let you seek out land only gives you marginal control.

Scapeshift though allows you to completely reinvent your mana as well as finding any specialty lands that may be in your deck. This rare sorcery from the morningtide expansion set of magic the gathering costs two green and two colorless and allows you to sacrifice any number of lands and then search out that many lands and put them into play tapped.

The first thing of note is that this card does not say basic lands, this means that you can get truly good lands with this, such as dual lands, mishras factories, maze of Ith, library of leng, and others by sacrificing far weaker lands, or perhaps the most powerful, this would let you sacrifice lands in order to seek out all the parts of the urza's lands making for a great deal of colorless mana.

All of this is interesting at at times it may be valuable but the real value of this card is with the new ability in Zendikar, landfall. This is an ability that triggers every time a land is put into play, that means that with this you would be able to trigger it as many times as you have land in play, and while you may choose not to do it that much if you happen to have one or two of the powerful landfall creatures out it could be very valuable. This is also true of other types of ability that require lands such as those that get a bonus for each type of basic land in play.

The final value of this card is one that isn't likely to occur in most decks, but if you happen to be playing a deck that finds itself going into long games often this can be a good deck thinner. Once you have ten or twelve land out this can be played and you can replace those land with other lands from your deck making it far more likely that you will draw spells rather than lands each turn and while none of these alone makes this card a must have combine they make a card that is going to fit very well into certain decks.

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