How does dragonskull summit work

The Dragonskull Summit cycle is a powerul and elegant set of dual lands for Magic's modern era. Each of these lands has seen extensive play in popular archetypes in standard and I don't see this ending anytime soon. The effect is negligible the fact you cant drop them first turn is an inconvenience but not a deal breaker. They smooth out a decks mana and allow multicolor decks to flow easier, Jund being the primary example.

In extended these lands are not popular we have the Shock and Pain lands available making these redundant, although being able to drop a first turn shock land then have one of these bad boys come into play untapped sets you up color wise although leaves you vulnerable to Blood Moon.

In eternal these lands will not see play at all. In casual and multiplayer, casual and new players shy away from damage but could still benefit from mana fixing, these cards are a Godsend to them other then the price tag of course. In limited its a solid grab if there is nothing better in the pack and smooths out your mana if you need the color fixing or are thinking of going a particular color a must have.

Overall a powerful set of lands, not on par with the duel lands of past but still worth playing, now I want to see the enemy colored cycle of these lands. Constructed : 3. Today's card of the day is Dragonskull Summit which returns to from and remains an excellent second turn or later dual land drop. There is a risk of an opening hand with these lands as your only mana sources, but having that happen at the same time as holding a card or cards that could be played before they can be untapped is a relatively slim chance.

For a two color deck running a large number of basic lands this cycle of allied cards works quite well as support with minimal risk of any drawback compared to tap or pain lands. For Limited this is a great card to open up in Sealed for the value, but you may not have the pool of Red and Black cards to justify actually playing this in your deck.

For Booster this is worth rare drafting, but again putting together both Black and Red cards can be demanding from a first pick land. Even if drafting this try to keep your options open and as this is a support card and not necessarily something to build an entire deck around.

Dragonskull Summit. Dragonskull Summit, like the other dual lands in the set is going to obviously be as popular as whatever decktype uses the colors. It'll be in what remains of Jund decks, it'll be in Vampires that might splash red, it'll be wherever. Pojo's Magic The Gathering news, tips, strategies and more! That was a big downside for a deck that aimed to cast expensive spells in the mid-to-late game. So checklands will be much better for control decks. Herein lies a potential downside of the checklands compared to the shadowlands.

Then again, I expect that for most decks the upside of drawing a more-likely-to-be-untapped Dragonskull Summit in the mid-to-late game carries more weight. Another thing to point out is that for minor splashes in an otherwise mono-colored deck, the checklands will be superior to the shadowlands.

Imagine, for instance, a Ramunap Red deck splashing Scrapheap Scrounger. It is much more reasonable to do this with Dragonskull Summit which will usually enter untapped when you draw it on turn than with Foreboding Ruins which will frequently enter tapped when you draw it on turn , potentially resulting in an off-curve Hazoret.

To get a feel for the numbers, I set up a simulation under the following simplifying assumptions:. The simple Java code I used is available here. The outcome is as follows. These numbers should be interpreted as the percentage probability that under the assumptions listed above if you have a checkland in hand on a given turn and decide to play it, it will enter untapped. I expect that this can be reasonably achieved even for 3-color decks, especially given that cycling duals count as well.

With 10 basics, this number increases to You need more basic-type lands for that. These numbers differ from the ones you might obtain with a hypergeometric distribution. This is because I take into account mulligans based on the number of lands in your opening hand and I effectively condition on the presence of a checkland.

But given these numbers, I would be hesitant to choose a 4 Dragonskull Summit, 4 Ramunap Ruins, 4 Sunscorched Desert , and 12 Mountain mana base in a deck with Hazoret. The fraction of games where you miss your curve because of a tapped Dragonskull Summit do add up and could greatly harm an aggro deck that needs to curve out.

The biggest benefit of staying mono-color with no splashes is that you can easily incorporate colorless lands like Sunscorched Desert or Scavenger Grounds into your mana base.

But unless your deck or the metagame specifically calls for it, these cards are mediocre. An interesting new option from Ixalan is Field of Ruin. It might be good in Modern against a deck with no basic lands. In Standard, you could pair it with Aven Mindcensor to hopefully break the symmetry. You could also run it as an untapped mana fixer for some 5-color deck.

Depending on how the metagame shakes out, I can see 2-color control decks including a Field of Ruin or two as a safeguard. These decks lost battlelands and shadowlands, retained cycling duals, and gained checklands. Two good dual lands is already enough to ensure a good level of mana consistency, and the Submerged Boneyards make it so that I would be comfortable running both Walk the Plank and Disallow in the same deck.

This mana base gives 19 black sources and 17 blue sources. There are 20 lands with the basic type Island or Swamp in the deck, which is more than enough for Drowned Catacomb. Hoping to cast Opt on turn 1 with this mana base may be too ambitious, as there are only 7 sources of blue mana for turn 1. These decks lost creaturelands Wandering Fumarole and gained nothing, so you end up with 16 sources of either color and no way to mitigate flooding.

Enemy-colored decks always had fewer dual lands than allied-color pairs, but you used to have such a wealth of dual lands that you never really noticed the difference.

Now that you have fewer dual lands overall, the difference is palpable. This means that in Ixalan Standard, the mana for allied two-color decks is now better than the mana for enemy two-color decks by a large amount. Indeed, allied two-color decks have two good dual lands—enemy two-color decks only have one. This will drive many players toward allied colors. If you want to play an enemy-color pair with double-colored spells in both colors, you better make use of energy Aether Hub , artifacts Spire of Industry , or tribal Unclaimed Territory.

Otherwise, your mana is going to suck. A blue-red control deck in particular would be able to exploit Aether Hub as a mana fixer via Glimmer of Genius and Harnessed Lightning. Although I used the generic blue-red mana base above to highlight the difference between allied-color and enemy-color decks, a realistic mana base for a blue-red control deck in Ixalan Standard would surely run 4 Aether Hub and, consequently, fewer Highland Lake.