These Castles are currently cheap, but I don’t expect that to last. I expect to play it in every black deck I have going forward, swamps or no. Let me be clear, this is not about being cutthroat, and leveraging avery incremental value angle, it’s more about giving yourself options. Your basic swamp doesn’t offer that potential, and for the Low Opportunity Cost of swapping out a swamp for Castle Lochthwain, you might get an edge you didn’t have otherwise. Sometimes you might pay 8 or more life for that card, but if you opponent’s wincon is on the stack, and you’re at 40, what does 8 life matter? Either you draw the answer or you die. But every so often it will draw you a card for 1 life on an empty hand. So most of the time, Castle Lochthwain will be just one of the swamps, making Bs. They don’t get a type bonus, but they aren’t legendary either. They’re pretty easy to get in untapped, and tap for their colour of mana without drawback.

Why am I so excited about something like this? It’s the ‘Low Opportunity Cost.’ What that means is that this Castle, and all the others, are pretty much just basics with a tweak. I loved them all at first sight, and have already added a few to my decks. I’ll dive right in with the first two examples, freshly printed in Throne of Eldraine. This is a series about how great lands that do impressions of basics can be. This is not a series about how great basics are. Planeswalkers… we love you Plains! Skull implied. And Plains, confusing in plural, ambiguous beside Planes, especially with Plainswalkers vs. Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth and Cabal Coffers are like peaches and cream that grew out of Swamps. Valakut kills people in Modern with Mountains. Wood Elves and similar friends who fetch Forests see tons of play across Commander. There’s a longstanding joke-not-joke that the Island is Magic’s most powerful card. When you are in a single colour, basics do a lot of your work. It’s tough to do much better than basics sometimes.

Mono black dredge edh