Legendary artist Mark Poole, best known for painting Magic: The Gathering's Birds of Paradise and Ancestral Recall, along with other notable masterpieces, has finally entered the Realm. His first two paintings for Sorcery: Contested Realm are two Elite sites, Tundra and Scoria, featured in the Frostmage vs. Lavamancer decklists.
Aligned in the corresponding Avatar's elements, Tundra matches 
and 
thresholds to whichever is higher, and and . As Elites, you can play a pair of either in your deck, but which archetypes would want to, especially since the effect doesn't stack?
Personally, after the {Research" data-game="sorcery">Scoria does the same for 
and 
. As Elites, you can play a pair of either in your deck, but which archetypes would want to, especially since the effect doesn't stack?
Personally, after the {Research spoiler, I'm back in the lab with my ImmOrbal Throne Magician brew. Moving into was my way to dodge Mock Court and use the powerful draw spells offers, like Searing Truth, Morgana le Fay, and Pact of the Devil. Since the culminating spell of the strategy is Chaoswish, pivoting back to being predominantly is appealing.
With any double-threshold site, Tundra and Scoria function as double-threshold sites of their counterparts. If I have Mountain Peaks, Tundra looks like Deep Sea, and vice versa; the same applies to Active Volcano and Fertile Earth. So why not just max out those double-threshold sites?
First, some strategies might want fourth and even fifth copies of the double-threshold sites, mine included. I'd happily run a baseline site suite of the following before adding in sites with spell-like effects:
3 Mountain Peak
3 Deep Sea
2 Tundra
Tundra and Scoria boost consistency by always being whatever the other double-threshold site isn't. In this case, once you find a second copy of either double-threshold site, Tundra is the highest-density threshold site available.
For example, Research costs , so I'm interested in Mountain Peaks from the jump. If I open two Mountain Peaks and Tundra in my opening hand, that Tundra is functionally a site on turn three. Mesermism suddenly looks really appealing.
What if, as another example, you sequence Active Volcano into Arid Desert into River of Blood into Vindictive Nation; your opponent likely doesn't have Archangel Michael on their radar. If you played Scoria as your fifth site, however, suddenly you went from having no to off a single site to cast the powerful Unique.
The Realm is already a tricky labyrinth to navigate with known information. The notion of having to consider extremely dense threshold haymakers cast off a single Scoria or Tundra from the top rope is an entirely new looming threat not previously available in the game.
Staples Incoming
This is only the tip of the iceberg...err...Tundra with these new Elite sites. I anticipate they'll become mainstays of two-element strategies and might even enable heavy backdoor splashes for those greedy enough to try. Imagine your opponent drops a Tundra out of nowhere in the mid-game to slap you with an Archangel Raphael.
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Featured image: Tundra by Mark Poole
