by Elton Gahr

Created on: November 07, 2009

Land destruction is simply not what it used to be. As someone who used to regularly ruin people's day with the combination of sinkholes and strip mines I can assure you that it is unlikely to become that powerful again in the future and while the lack of good land destruction has made the game a of magic a bit more narrow it has also made it generally more fun as even the land destruction player really didn't get all that much out of games in which the opponent sat helpless while he killed him with a few small red and black creatures.

There are still ways to hurt an opponent's mana producing capabilities of course. Bounce is one that is common now and is reasonably effective though no where near as annoying since you can put the land back onto the board the next turn. Another way is Pooling venom which makes a person far less likely to use their own land.

Pooling venom is a land enchantment which costs one black and one colorless to play and makes it so that whenever the land it enchants is tapped it does its controller two damage. In addition to this the card has a second ability, which is that for one black mana and three colorless you can destroy the enchanted land. Making it a slow, but marginally effective land destruction card.

In a land destruction deck the way to use this is reasonably simple. On your second turn, you attach this to one of their lands because you don't have a sinkhole. You then play stone rain or some other land destruction hitting other lands as you build up your mana, then when the land that this is attached to is either their land land, or you have run out of anything else to play you destroy the land, limiting the damage they can do to themselves but slowing them down another turn. Not a bad strategy but it doesn't actually stop them.

The major problem with that strategy is that there are simply not many other good land destruction cards to go with it and alone it is not powerful enough to make this have any value as the extra card in a land destruction deck and so it become a lone card which is largely ignored by the person who it is used against as they simply take a couple points of damage if they truly need the mana.

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