Tuesday 10 April 2012

Rishadan Port

Rishadan Port

Okay, first up: one card I really don't understand. I understand what the card does and everything, I just don't understand why everyone thinks it's so amazing. Tapping to add a colourless - good. Not coming into play untapped - good. Paying 1 and tapping to tap a land - not so great. Think about it: you're tapping 2 of your lands to tap 1 of their lands. The trade just isn't worth it.

In set, this card was awesome as Masques was really slow mana-wise. However, outside of set this card is not that good. There are 2 scenarios in which I can see this being used. The first is to tap a dual or multi-land when your opponent is mana-screwed. Yes, this is a good idea, however you are screwing yourself over as well because you're losing 2 lands (or a land and a mana rock) in order to tap down their land. The second scenario is to tap down a land in order to slow your opponent down. If that's the case, your master plan is defeated when they make their land-drop for the turn.

Sure, there are certain situations where this is useful (Cabal Coffers, Gaea's Cradle, Tolarian Academy...) but they are too few and far between to warrant the $40 pricetag this card has currently.

Pros: It comes in untapped and it produces colourless (for colourless EDHs?)
Cons: The secondary ability is pretty useless
Alternatives: Icy Manipulator, Wasteland (for nonbasic lands), Strip Mine, any land destruction, Early Frost
Rating: 3/5

2 comments:

  1. in set it was decent primarily for stopping maze of ith, but otherwise ya not that great

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  2. Its main use and why it became popular was to stop City of Brass, because whenever city became tapped, for ANY reason, its controller was dealt one damage. Control decks could abuse this if their opponent played City of Brass, which itself was a fairly popular land in its time. Being able to pay 2 mana a turn to tap your opponents land and deal them a damage was a pretty good trade off.

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