Last week, Wizards of the Coast announced the Magic: the Gathering You Make the Card 4 and their plans to encourage communication on the project. We here at Major Spoilers followed through on their request. This week shows a bit of a wrinkle in their initial plan, which we’ll discuss after the jump.

First off, here’s the card in it’s current form.

We’ll go ahead and show you this each time more information comes out so we can all see how the card is coming along.

Last week was supposed to determine the Card Type and as you can see above, that is still blank. Remember that wrinkle I mentioned? Well, turns out two Card Types came in so close at the top that Wizards is uncomfortable stating that one is the winner. They explain a bit more here, but what it all boils down to is a rule that will be henceforth in the contest. Any vote that comes within two percent (2%) for the top will go into a run off week where only those in that top category will be options. And that is what happened, with approximately 26% of the vote each, Land and Enchantment are up for the run off round. Which will be the next made card? Which do you want? Well, this is what we here at Major Spoilers have to argue, and joining us this week is Colter, one of the Major Spoilers writers that hasn’t been around for awhile..

OUR ARGUMENTS

Rob

I still vote Land. Of the two types I find that Land is going to be the more interesting one to work with as well as be the most likely one to become fully playable. Let’s face it, Enchantments are rarely among the powerful cards, and most of the time the ones that are strong enough to see real play barely cut the scene anyhow. While there may be more places to tweak everything on the Enchantment, most notably in a mana cost, I was fully expecting to give the Land some sort of activated ability to mess around with there. While Enchantment would have been my second choice, due to it being the other “new” type, I feel that Land just forces us to work harder on breaking it.

Rodrigo

I’m going with “Enchantment” on this one, last week I argued that creatures have the largest amount of potential “sliders”, things that can be tweaked for balance, and lands have the fewest. I stand by that. Any land that is powerful enough to be interesting is also going to have massive drawbacks, an enchantment will allow for power and has more places to bear it, especially in its mana cost.

Colter

Lands and Enchantments both hold the power to turn the tide of the game, but they both have their weaknesses. Enchantments are powerful in that they can alter phases, change creature stats, ramp mana, and the list goes on and on. In addition their effect is typically lasting while the card is in play. Their weakness is in their identifiability. Opponents will/should always recognize Enchantments as a threat because, though it may not directly affect their board, it may give their opponent the leverage they need to come out ahead. Enchantments are also easily removed from play with counter-spells, numerous destroy effects, and other Enchantments such as Aura Shards or Oblivion Ring. Lands though are typically seen as less a threat because of their “one-off” effects. Even the most devastating non-basic lands such as Bojuka Bog have effects that could be compared to an Instant or Sorcery. Sure they hurt, but unless that player can flicker that land later on, their effect resolves and you can go about recovering from the hit. Lands make up for their lack of power in their stability. Players have a lot less cards to choose from to deal with lands than they do Enchantments, and unless a player specifically tools their deck to deal with it their opponent’s land aren’t going anywhere. So for me it comes down to the power of an Enchantment vs the stability of a Land, and while I typically run Enchantment-heavy decks I’ll have to put my vote on Lands. I just really want to see some more evil Land abilities that could ruin my opponent’s day.

Again, let us know your opinion in the comments below and the be sure to go vote, as the voting ends this Friday morning.