Legendary lands that tap for mana of a color,
have another ability, and don't have any
drawback beyond being legendary are pretty much
always worth playing. All Urborg does is turn
off your opponent's first strike or swampwalk.
If you're playing black, swampwalk would be a
pretty big problem for you. First strike, maybe.
But the fact that you can include a card that
eliminates that problem in the place of one of
your Swamps and lose almost nothing? Format
legality and the secondary trade value of this
card are the only reasons not to play a
singleton of this in every black deck you ever
build. Yes, even if your deck is built around
Liliana of the Dark Realms and Tendrils of
Corruption, you should still have a copy of
this.
When Legends was new, nobody knew anything about
Urborg, Karakas, or indeed any of the places
mentioned on its legendary cards, but the set
was beloved anyway. It was the sense of mystery
and wonder, the feeling that you really were
exploring a multiverse of infinite possibility.
Sometimes I think about how new cards are
marketed for rotating formats like Standard and
how people try to "solve" deckbuilding, and I
wonder if we've lost something. Urborg is a
relic of another age in that sense, but if
you're lucky enough to own one, there's no shame
in putting it in any deck you might make. First
strike can mess with combat more than almost any
other ability, and since black doesn't get much
of it on its own, you can use this to even the
field. Even if all you want to do is combine
Urborg and Magical Hack and repeatedly remove
plainswalk from creatures, that's pretty funny,
and funny things are good.
Have a great weekend, readers. And if you can .
. . log off of the forums and Facebook and such.
Just for a little while.
Today's card of the day is Urborb which is a
Legendary land that taps for Black or to remove
either First Strike or Swampwalk from target
creature until end of turn. Aside from
being non-basic and not a Swamp there are no
other serious drawbacks to running a copy of
this in many Black decks and the effects may be
useful in certain situations.
For Limited there is unlikely to be any reason
not to include this in a deck using Black mana
and if an opponent has Swampwalk or First Strike
all the better. Removal or a bomb creature
is a stronger second or third pick, but this
does work well enough after a first pick in
Black to be considered before other on color
choices. In Sealed any Black build can
benefit from this unless basic Swamps are being
counted.
