Snow | EDHREC Room 

For Joey's Eligeth and Neyith case, I'd just rule 0 that those basics are snow. It's just art in that case, so I wouldn't mind.

Im sure many play groups would be open to letting people use regular basics for their art instead of snow-covered ones as long as people are open about it before the game begins

I really don't understand the problem, there are a handful of cards that benefit from Snow? Dosn't seem like a big deal

I see your point. The mechanic pretends to have a trade off, but the trade off isn't a gameplay choice, because snow lands can do everything non snow lands can do, thus obsoleting non snow. I don't care for snow because it doesn't seem thematic, but arbitrary.

I love that they're acting like every commander player is going to abandon basic lands entirely. I don't think anyone is sitting down, looking at their opponent's basics and thinking "sweet... they aren't playing snow." so I now still have no idea which 99 of the 20k magic cards ever printed they're choosing to run... the best cards in commander still don't contain snow mana. It's fine. We're going to be okay guys

Maybe a solution to this problem would be to give more payoffs for running pure basic lands. That way the normal basics would benefit from the same upside the snow lands currently have but on the other side of the spectrum.

They need to start sprinkling in cards that care about normal basics. Throw a couple summer or sun themed cards in each color per core set and make them solid. Then after some time their will be up and downside to opting for one type over the other and it’ll be a defensible and fun deck building choice either way. I also think as a community we should try to normalize rule zero my lands are snow lands because I like this art better, so people can play with the lands they want. Bonus points for alter sleeves that add snowflakes ❄️

You're not wrong. But the problem was already here and has been since at least Modern Horizons.

I'm changing my monogreen Ayula to snow, but just because I want to call the deck "Aurora Bearealis"

Easy fix. Use Rule Zero and tell your playgroup all Basic Lands in your deck are actually Snow Basics regardless of art.

I don't agree with you guys, i think that's an arid critique. WOTC has to design cards for the formats it manages, and i think it can't stop from printing new things just because there isn't a wide choice of artworks we EDH players can pick. Furthermore it's true that playing snow basics has basically no downside but also it has very little upside apart from maybe one or two cards of your 100.

I think no amount of snow hate is going to work because you need to add that card to your deck and especially in Commander those slots are incredibly small. I only have 10 or so cards available for answers between synergy ramp card draw and lands, plus I don't have a whole lot of options for snow in specificate so I'm likely only going to have a 1% chance of ever drawing it. You need a reason to make people want to play basic lands. Something specific that basic lands can do that snow lands can't and it needs to be something versatile enough that people want to play it.

Dana called it best, Realms Uncharted & Field of the Dead are my reason for not switching to all snow basics. One will do me just fine 🙂

I do agree that snow basics have a slight advantage over normal basics. But I would like to respectfully disagree that non snow basics are “thrown out”. I think there isn’t enough of an advantage to choose snow basics over non snow unless the deck needs them, and usually that’s only a couple of cards in the deck that matter, which may not even be necessary within those decks. I have a deck that is clone tribal (morophon as commander with clone specific shapeshifters and fork spells, etc) and I currently run snow basics only because there is a slight chance I may copy something where it matters. But beyond that reason the deck works the same with non snow basics.

Probably going to institute a house rule that people can claim their basics are snow-covered regardless of the cardboard. That way you can still use the art you like without hurting your deck.

Another point beyond the aesthetics issue of incentivising players to use a very limited number of basics rather than express themselves through choosing from a great deal of cards, is the increased cost of snow lands versus normal basics. I'm 90% of the way through the video and you haven't mentioned this yet but snow basics cost a couple of dollars each generally over effectively 10 cents for most normal basics, which adds up if you have a lot of decks to 'snow out'

If the had treated the snow lands the same as the artifact lands (4 max each) it would have been a lesser issue.

This doesn'y feel like much of a problem. I already run some snow lands in my decks for cards like into the north, and I've never felt the need to switch out every basic land for snow lands. There might be a few corner cases like mono colored decks running extraplanar lens or that new graven lore card, but other than that this feels a lot like when i hear about people complaining about infect being broken in commander. It looks like a problem on paper, but in practice isn't so much of a problem.

I think the only way to really solve this issue would be to let players like. Somehow say their regular basic lands are to be treated as snow lands within their deck somehow? Or at least in commander to allow that within your group if it's impossible to allow that in official settings

Last time I was this early Arcum's Astrolabe was still legal in modern.

My play group is cool with people proxying their snow lands with whatever basic they want.

Prepare my butt? Joey, what are you gonna do to my butt?

My first mono red EDH deck that I build on my own was Purphuros, Bronze-Blooded and I run 30 basic Theros constellation mountains in it. For long time I was thinking of switching them for snow mountains just to run Extraplanar Lens for additional ramp but those constellation lands fit so perfectly into my constellation Purphuros that it was very difficult decision to make for me. Now I am happy that i didnt do it becouse, as Matt said, now Extraplanar Lens will be more vaiable with basic lands rather than snow lands.

I completely agree with the statement, but I don't think penalizing snow land is the solution. Coz if you play against non-snow decks you end up with dead cards. I think the solution is to bring the non-snow basic land to the level of snow ones. They have the diamond symbol for color less mana, the snow symbol for the snow producing cards; they can have a clover symbol or similar for non-snow producing colored mana. That way you could have: ": ...." or even cards stating: "scry X where X is the number of non-snow mana used to cast it"... They will have to explicitly emphasize the "non-snow" mana in the future sets. This will however have an effect of requiring the snow producing mana to be a lot more present in magic land not just once every 15 years.

I am snow disappointed by wotc. Best mtg commander podcast btw :)

I play Ayula and I've had snow basics in it since day 1. It fit the theme of bears in the frozen north.

Being on the topic of snow, I'm from South Florida and I am always dissapointed at the severe lack of blizzards of the coast this time of year.

Snowbody knows the trouble we see.... time for my Legions of Lim Dul / Urborg hidden tech to shine.

It's funny, because I never really thought this was a huge problem before (even after Modern Horizons, honestly), but I definitely see it now. Previously it seemed like the consensus was you could run snow if you were really seeking those last marginal edges, but I don't remember really seeing it in a cEDH context (I think Extraplanar Lens is too slow for cEDH), but the more snow cards we get, the more likely it is that there's going to be some factor pushing you to consider it for any given deck, and I think that threshold might've been crossed now. My Gonti deck ran snow swamps from its inception (originally just for Extraplanar Lens and Withering Wisps, I added Dead of Winter after Modern Horizons), but I did that as much to be cute as anything else (I like Withering Wisps, I've never seen anyone else play it), and out of nostalgia for Ice Age/Coldsnap (I wanted to have at least one deck with snow lands). I have a feeling we're going to be seeing a lot more decks like that going forward, where the deck isn't thematically tied to snow in any way, but still runs them because it's correct gameplay; I always enjoyed snow more when it was an oddball choice you'd make to run weird cards. I was one of the only people at my LGS/playgroup to have a deck with snow lands, but I no longer expect that to be the case at all. I considered myself a fan of snow, it has some aesthetics I like and it felt like a weird oddball thing that was sometimes worth doing. When it's just optimal, it loses most of its appeal. (I don't know how to fix this with snow hate either though.) (Also in my experience, the main issue holding people back from running snow manabases was budgetary, because Extraplanar Lens is an expensive card, and the snow basics cost more than other basics. This is going to be yet another thing driving up the cost of the format, I think, or at least perceived to do so. I don't love it.)

It's a tricky question, how they should handle snow design (and should have in Kaldheim). Because the issue is kind of baked in from all the way in Ice Age, that snow lands are just better. Hate cards would have to be generally useful, widely played, and therefore couldn't be targeted or they'd be pretty useless. I'm kinda hoping we get some green or black snow hate from the Elf commander deck, but it's a hard needle to thread. I think one interesting aspect to it that's hard to see is that a lot of the new cards want you to go all-in on snow. (Graven Runes, Jorn, the snow zombie lord) Some have scaling effects for each snow mana spent, and so disincentivize non-snow lands like regular duals and utility lands. I think that's honestly for the best! By pricing the new cards at all-snow levels, it makes them unappealing for decks that need better mana fixing or want special utility lands. I don't think a lot of the new cards will see much play in three-color decks or even a lot of two-color ones, which helps. But mono-color will still play mostly basics, so there's no downside in that case. Tricky.

Simple answer: "Guys, every land in my deck is Snow. I just like the art for these basics. Here, see I own a snow deck..."

What if wizzards erratad cards like blood moon to negatively effect snow lands aswell?

If Snow lands are so good, why isn't Arcum's Weathervane a format staple?

"Just disappointed" That's how I feel about this entire discussion. Much ado about nothing.

Not gonna lie I’m not changing my basics but I’ll get a sharpie and alter snow into them

I feel like snow basics at least for me became the best land since modern horizons. I actually bought 100 of each basic and have multiple decks that run snow cards like on thin ice or dead of winter. I suggest picking up a set now vs later

I feel the way to "fix the problem" is printing more incidental snow hate mixed with other effects similar to Reidane. Just put it on a bunch of spells, that also do other useful things, and it should be fine. The question is, where would WotC print these cards, because I assume they wouldn´t print stuff like that in a set, that has no snow mechanic...

lol, now I just want more snow land art work

How the heck do I find that podcast?

Ah you see this is why I just say it's winter in whatever plane my favorite srt is on.

I feel like the only fix that could be made by wizards of the cost is just to make ever basic land as a snow land. I once did a draft of modern horizon with one pack each and then 2 others of Dollarama packs and made the rule all basics are snow lands. You could play with the art of lands you enjoy and ask your play group if I could use the basic in my deck as snow. I feel like if this snow land problem is big enough for wizards and the commander rules group they might say snow lands is a rule 0 discussion. Hopefully wizards gets its act together

That's exactly what happened with my Ayula deck. Snow Bear was revealed and I went "well, why not?" No other deck of mine runs snow basics (yet). I never had a reason to. Regular basics work just fine and there was never a bonus to running snow lands, especially since my decks are budget

If there are some hate cards that are lands, it would not require a slot in the deck and would be widely playable. It would add a lot more risk to running snow everything.

I see it as if your running snow cards, you use snow lands. And vice versa. I have 6-7 decks ive made that use no snow. Its not like they immediately lose effectiveness for not running snows. Granted, if i find snow based cards to slot in, then yea ill throw snow ins to compensate. I dont understand the frustration?? Maybe im not seeing it.

Personally I want cards that get better for snow that your opponents control.... as then it is a choice to play them. The card needs to be decent anyway. something like Disenchant that hits 2 things if the opponent has 3+ snow permaments. The God is a step in the right direction, but there should be more. This set would have been a great opportunity as some of the realms are not going to be snow bound... after all the selesnya clan would need food etc. But the art is an underappreciated factor.

I use three snow lands in GUR Omnath so I can more easily use Field of the Dead. Besides that and Planar Lens, I don't get what people are on about. Even if the lands are better by being snow, what abuse that is snow specifically is so great that always has people frozen.

Maybe I'll change my mind in some months when this set has dropped and been played for awhile. I don't feel like running snow lands is any better or worse than running non-snow. I'll just take the example of you guys feeling like snow hate will be dead cards more often than not. Again I might change my mind after this newest bunch of snow gets played but if the hate are dead cards... Then it stands to reason the power increase to your deck by running snow is insignificant to the point of not being measurable.

Now only if WotC makes an enhancement that makes non snow covered lands into snow lands might make it more worth as you'll still get to play the lands you love and make them snow but that's just my opinion

I think it's best and will be best moving forward to play a mixture of snow and non snow lands in decks.

They could start printing good cards that incidentally hate snow lands perhaps? Good cards that'll show up frequently enough in regular decks that they disincentivize people from playing snow lands unless they specifically want it for a strategy.

I like the new snow lands it’s the cards they released along side them that are the issue for me cause I don’t plan on changing all my basics in so many decks for snow lands just to play a few cards guess I’ll just have to miss out on some cards

I think that Snow is just something you stick to only for mono-colored decks in EDH. You surely don't want to rely on having snow basics out in 3, 4 and 5-color decks. The chance you'll have the requisite snow basics in play to even affect the spells you cast is miniscule, your mana base just isn't going to allow you to have a ton of basics in your list. My 3 color decks run less than 10 basics (which might be wrong in some scenarios) but even then, you'll have maybe 2 or 3 snow basics out on an given game which almost is never worth the snow cards you're trying to use. The problem just gets worse in 4 and 5 color decks. I think a case could be made to go heavy on snow in a 2-color deck, but a good land base is going to have at least 10 dual colored lands in a 2-color deck and at that point you're starting to hit the threshold of rather having your duals out rather than your snow basics. I am not a huge fan of the snow mechanic, but if you're playing a mono-colored deck you need to take heavy consideration of having your 25+ basic land count be snow basics and then throwing in your beloved art basics into other decks. That's just my $.02.

The fact that it would take snow hate is already a problem of design... it shows shows is just better in almost all situations than basic basics.

WotC: Snow products are not for you. While it's a little thing, the power creep in Cmdr means these little things add up. A lot of my decks have gone from good to weak this past year bc I haven't made all the little upgrades from recent sets

I wonder if subsequent sets this year will have more snow hate?

Funnily enough I was actually considering going snow with my in-progress Neyith deck *anyway*, even before Kaldheim spoilers proper, just because.

Def going to be building the nightmare before christmas now

Surprisingly enough, very few people at my lgs play with full snow lands because they are fairly expensive to get in bulk. I am currently building a snow deck and I have seen one other mono-green bear trible deck that was running snow. So the price point could be keeping a lot of decks from running snow. Why toss another $45+ dollars into your budget deck to get all snow lands when you can run some basics you already have?

I'm thinking that there will be a foil to snow in a future set. Maybe something like Melting that's a cantriping artifact.

what about snow-walk being printed more?

Bring a stack of snow basics with you and essentially proxy them.

Well, having this problem in commander, you can just tell to your table that all your normal basic lands count as snow-covered lands

So very large counterpoint, as someone who's watched commander related content for the last few years, most 'influencers' or people with established collections were already running snow lands. I don't think Kaldheim is causing the change, perhaps accelerating an existing trend.

I propose a special emblem "token" card be created. We'll call this emblem "Snowmander". It will have the text "If you are playing Commander, you may start the game with Snowmander in play. All basic lands you own have the Snow trait".

I feel like WotC has a dilemma with snow in that Snow hate needs to exist that is worth running even when you have no one running snow (I saw the suggestion of a cycle of snow hosers that was appropriately costed Crush Contraband style cards with "Choose one or both: -[reasonably costed effect] -Destroy target snow permanent" at least one for each color), but when are they going to print snow hosers? If you do it in the set with snow then that potentially mucks up a draft/standard environment where they want snow to show off, but if you print it in any other set it might wind up being a partially dead card for draft, or at least feel out of place. I feel like a modern horizons 2 might be a place to put them, but I don't even know if I'd want to see such a set, since I don't trust them not to damage the modern format with it (and I don't even play modern).

So I completely see the issue with Snow now, I hadn't thought about it before. How do you think the mechanic or theme as a whole could be better designed though? I think the advantage of playing snow over non-snow is there, though doesn't seem huge? And there's no tradeoff because playing a snow basic is strictly better than non snow basic. However, at the same time, Snow cards don't seem THAT powerful either. If snow lands weren't as simple to use as non snow lands, these cards would just not be playable at all. I guess I'm saying the issue here is that Snow spells are very much ok, but the snow lands have more inherent power. Maybe it should have been backwards? Make the snow lands more restrictive and push the power of the snow spells themselves even more? The problem there then, would be that for a format like Commander it's already too late since snow basics were printed so long ago that it doesn't matter what they do this set? It's a weird situation..

Frankly, I think this issue doesn't really matter. Snow basics are kind of bad in 3+ color decks anyways because of fixing requirements, and the 1 or 2 color decks that could use snow probably already are. Theres really not much payoff for snow anyways, and the competitive advantage is negligible. It's like when people run fetches to thin their deck out, it really doesn't matter.

Just print cards that incentivizes killing snow for example 1RR destroy target land or two target snow lands

The part where I did look up the word 'cromulent' after hearing Dana mention it.

What about an "anti-snow" mechanic? "Snow mana can't be spent to cast this spell"? It's kind of an unpleasant design space, but snow mana got us here in the first place and it's kinda too late to put that back into the box.

Just want to point out that Scrying Sheets is spiking really hard right now...

Summary of this episode: There's no opportunity cost to running snow lands. I agree, from a gameplay perspective, there needs to be a trade-off, and it doesn't exist. But, here's a point I didn't hear brought up: This is made even worse when you consider snow lands cost far more money than non-snow. So, even if you want to play the shiny cards with no drawback to make your deck better, you have to shell out more money for your basics - pay to win, as it were. Budget players likely don't want to add another $12-20 to the cost of each deck. And that may not seem like much until you look at someone with 10-20 decks. Neyith was a perfect example - I'm currently building the deck, and Blizzard Brawl looks amazing, especially when combined with Apex Altisaur. Indestructible and fight to trigger the enrage make it a machine gun. Even with any other creature, though, it is the best sorcery-speed fight spell possible. But to do that, I'll need a hefty number of snow-covered basics.

Just declare all your basics are snow basics beforw the game. If people don't allow that, you don't want to play with them.

uh oh... there are only recrooms when we're in trouble.

This isn't a big deal to me. Do I care if my opponents run snow basics as a bluff? No. Do I care about the EXTREMELY small advantage that I get from running snow basics as a bluff? No. If my deck doesn't use snow basics, I'm gonna run the same regular basics I always do. If I decide to make a deck around the snow mechanic in Kaldheim, I'll put them in. I guess I just don't take this casual format as seriously as some people do lol

It feels as though with each WOTC release commander decks become less personal. They just keep making cards that are too hard NOT to put in your deck

this trend will snowball for sure

I like to have all my lands match the plane of my commander. If they are from an unknown plane I use the double masters full art.

I mean . . . I am definitely going to re-deck Wake of Destruction.

I mean if you want to play lands you don’t like for a .000001% increase in win rate that just seems like your decision.

I've said it in the discord and I'm saying it here time to build snolos!

WoTC's solution: Print more Snow Basics with varying arts so people can buy more cards. Also no more arts done by Terese Nielsen or Harold McNeill.

Would kaldheim snow stuff be a big deal if it wasn't for modern horizons

I imagine that WOTC didn't want to put a low costed Armageddon in the draft format if they figured people were going to run snow lands as the basics. I wouldn't be surprised if we see our 'Snowmageddon' spells in Strixhaven.

So it's time to build Reidane.

Aka the scarface decks

Easy fix errand the snow basic to non basic 🤷🏼‍♂️

Instead of punishing playing snow, we need pay offs for playing non snow "Non snow basic lands add (1 generic Mana) to your Mana pool when tapped for Mana in addition to it's normal Mana"

Yo, how we doing bois?

I do see this issue in a competitive environment. You are playing there to win as fast as you can and that small edge of having snow lands is a real deal. In commander, I don't see a super oppressive card requiring snow that everybody needs to use. I will build a snow deck, play it for a while, and then move on to Strixhaven with my favorite lands. Sometimes you don't get the bear you wanted for your Bear-force One deck and that should be ok. You don't need to play with it. Also, does it really matter that my opponent thinks that I'm the snow-bolt? On the other hand, the real problem is printing the Jeweled Lotus, Hullbreacher, etc. Those cards are very very strong and they are not fun for the table. I do think that there is a line to be drawn here between casual and competitive EDH (along other competitive formats). Love the content folks. Always opening discussions. This my honest opinion.

Umm.... Graven Lore for the Eligeth deck was mentioned a few times, but how often are these "dilemmas" really going to happen? Every EDH deck build ever involves choices that foreclose other mutually exclusive choices. Maybe... run the snow lands in a deck that substantially benefits from snow lands, and don't when you don't? How often are you going to have to make this epic aesthetic sacrifice, *really*? How competitive are you playing your casual format that you feel coerced into playing snow lands because you just might gain that razor-thin edge of bluffability? I likely won't play snow lands because I don't need them... unless I decide to build a deck that goes ham on snow. Seems a bit overly pearl-clutchy today, boys.

The sad thing is that snow lands will sell boxes. More boxes will sell just so players cagn get their hands on snow lands. The booster bundle contains non-snow basics because they want to sell boxes not bundles. It's just another example of corporate greed that will bet them a profit. MTG players complain a lot but never cease to spend all their 💰

I cant see the point of this conversation when running snow basics was always the right choice, like, it's not something new. Snow lands existed before kaldheim and rarely I've seen people using those lands, and at the same time it already was the optimized choice. People complain about the homogenize of the commander format. but get pissed about they "having" to run those lands. Big news, you dont have to run those, it's absolutely your own choice. Preexisting cards works like they had before kaldheim and the new ones just add to the experience, without subtracting anything.

Just use rule 0 to proxy your current basics as snow covered.

I feel like at this point the only way to balance it back woudl be to make sets with spells that specifically dont work with snow so you have to choose between groups of cards

89th

Wow! Normally a fan of your work, but this felt like whining for the sake of whining. Snow lands have been thing since ice age and it has always been technically correct to play snow basics since then. None of your arguments hold any real weight except for a few specific synergistic cards with a few specific commanders. The 'bluff' potential is so minimal it's statistically non-existent. You still don't have to play these lands or the cards that rely on snow. You have choices. The point of commander is you get to choose the suboptimal option if you want to - so choose the snow theme or don't - nothing here MAKES you choose one over the other.

Discussion is fair but Kaldheim did pretty much nothing to change what Snow is or how it affects the game. If you don't care about Min/Maxing there is really nothing to talk about (and yes, I know that this podcast is pretty much about Min/Maxing but I enjoy it without caring about that in my decks at all).

I mean with how commander is, you could just tell people that "hey I like these lands art, but I wanted them to be snow lands" Also being down 1 or 2 cards from the new set is not something that will absolutely destroy the viability of your deck. You do not really need to add these new snow cards and turn all the basics in the deck to snow. I think you guys are over reacting on how many people are now gonna rush to having only snow lands. To me I am happy the cost of them is going down because it helps my mono colored decks that do run extraplanar lens

here's a solution for the likes of WOTC to milk players just like snow being winter-themed, get something else like Summer, Spring, and Autumn and make people chasing around for all these weird supertypes~