I was looking at some cards of the new set and realised it’s a real shame that the basic land art never ever shows up in game since we don’t do mana the same way…
I have zero idea on how it could be used (because getting a land picture when you click on a coloured mana would bug people!) but maybe Oktagon can think of something cool…
Someone had the idea a while ago (can’t remember who) to make basic lands super generic color converters that everyone has (you know, a 4 mana “at the start of the turn convert 1 gem to X” support with 3 shields).
Give them to every player for free and just update the art every once in a while
Something like that might be cool. Really weak but cheap.
But rather than updating the art, have it be random art from the whole backlog each time and just add new art to the possibilities. (With the RNG biased towards showing things it hasn’t shown for a while to stop repetition.)
That would be cool! Alternately, they could just put all the variations in as separate cards. Putting multiples into the same deck would only be worthwhile for people who don’t have good collections yet (or had their good cards rotate to legacy) and people in that situation could use a boost to make things less frustrating. It could also make some of those cards that count how many lands you have actually worth using.
They’ve used the basic land art occasionally as backgrounds behind the field of creatures and gems, and the Zendikar lands appear as creatures for cards with Awaken.