Picture this: it's Pro Tour: San Diego 2004. You're walking around late at night, monitoring side drafts and Standard tournaments when you see a group of about eight players gathered around a table. These players aren't part of any of the organized side events - and yet they're screaming and yelling like they just won the Pro Tour.

As I walk up behind them and glance over a shoulder — and what I see isn‘t a draft game. It's not Vintage, and it's not even good, old-fashioned Standard.

All I see are basic lands.

A group of players from Asia were all gathering around a couple players playing what I would eventually translate into what I call “The Land Game.” It was a simple way to pass the time between events or even just between rounds, and it appeared to be horrendously fun.

After watching these players go back and forth for no less than an hour, I got a general idea of what was going on (they either didn't speak any English or were choosing not to, so I had to reason it out for myself). Each player had a deck of sixty cards that consisted of twelve each of the five basic lands. Each land type appeared to do three things; it was a creature or one or two different spells.

Unfortunately, this was really all I was able to gather from what I saw. I did notice that all the spells seem to fit the flavor of the land type — for example, often I'd would see a player flash a Swamp to his opponent and this would be followed either by the flash of an Island (a Counterspell) or the creature would be put in the graveyard (a removal spell). So from the simple workings of what I had seen, I told my fellow judges and we developed our own version of the game.

Here is what we came up with: Each player could play only a single creature during their turn, but as many spells as they wished. All spells and creatures were free, there was no mana. Other than that, what follows is the initial list of abilities for each basic land type... And we went through many incarnations before we finally achieved what we believe to be a fairly well-balanced game.

Swamp
Creature: 2/2, Pay 1 life: Regenerate
Dark Banishing (instant): Destroy target non-swamp creature.
Night's Whisper (sorcery): Draw 2 cards, lose 2 life.

Mountain
Creature: 2/2, Haste
Shock (instant): 2 damage to target creature or player.
Earthquake (sorcery), X=3: Deal 3 damage to each player and each creature without flying.

Forest
Creature: 3/3
Symbiosis (instant): Two target creatures get +2/+2.
Giant Growth (instant): Target Creature gets +3/+3.

Plains
Creature: 2/2 First Strike
Healing Salve (instant): Prevent the next 3 damage to a creature or gain 3 life.
Righteousness (instant): Target blocking creature gets +7/+7.

Island
Creature: 2/2, Flying
Counterspell (instant): Counter target spell.
Catalog (sorcery): Draw 2 cards, discard a card.

Using this basic list, we started playing games between our own events. The game was fun, but it lacked balance, since certain effects were just too powerful. For example, countering a creature when you are only allowed to play one a turn proved to be a gamebreaker if it happened on consecutive turns. Also, the Swamp card drawing far outweighed the Island as far as power levels went. There was literally no way to kill the black creature except by countering it.

As a side project, whenever I helped judge any event that gathered some of the Arizona judges, we worked on perfecting this game.

The challenge when working on this was keeping it simple: The game was originally designed so that players could pick up a stack of land and be able to play without having to have a list of what the cards did or have anything written on them. Thus, we had to make an effort to balance the game whilst trying to use generic cards that we were all familiar with. In many cases, there were existing cards that worked well with the format and were things that everyone knew. These were things like Giant Growth and Healing Salve.

In other cases, the concept was simple, but the card names were too obscure for newer players, like Catalog and Righteousness. At this point, I decided not only did I need to update it for balance, but I needed to ensure that newer players could identify with all the cards.

The first thing I did was try to achieve balance by identifying the cards that were causing power issues. The immediate culprits were the swamp creature, Night's Whispers, Symbiosis, and Counterspell. We'll start with Counterspell since, it was the easiest fix; the problem was that it was countering creatures, so we eliminated that. It became Ravnica's Muddle the Mixture, but without the transmute ability.

The swamp creature was the next task. We wanted to keep its ability in flavor for a black creature. Initially, we just tried raising the cost of using its ability, but it remained overpowered at two or even three life per activation. This didn't work, so we suggested changing the cost to “Discard a card”... But now the cost was so extravagant that no one bothered to play swamps as creatures. So we decided to just get rid of regeneration.

It ended up being replaced by the ability to pay life for pumps. The final version ended up with the ability “Pay 3 life: +1/+1 until end of turn.” This would give the creature survivability at a cost, and also make it a dangerous attacker as it had a built-in Hatred effect (though drastically weakened, of course). We all felt it was both in flavor and at a reasonable power level.

However, this ended up creating another problem whose solution ended up solving the “Righteousness” issue. The black creature ended up dominating the board, as it was still nearly unkillable (though at a much steeper cost) and often was used as a finisher card. To balance this out, we needed a way for people to punish a player abusing this creature. We found our solution in the base set in an underused card called Chastise. This provided a nice balance (as well as life to feed your own) to the swamp creature. It also had the effect of creature momentum shifts that made the game much more interesting.

Symbiosis was an easy fix. The big problem was that it was simply better than Giant Growth (+4/+4 vs. +3/+3). We fixed this by changing it to give two creatures +1/+1. This made it a little more of a combat trick (as opposed to a finisher) and caused attacking/blocking situations to become a little bit more complicated and interesting.

The final hurdle in this group was changing Night's Whisper. After trying all the variations on this thing we could think of (including just increasing the life loss, lowering the number of cards drawn, or making it a draw with discard), we finally came up with a way of balancing this card. The final version reads “Draw 2 cards, then lose life equal to the number of cards in your hand.”* This allowed a player who had lost card advantage or tempo to get back in the game whilst punishing a greedy player for simply wanting to draw more cards.

The next problem was cleaning up the spells that just weren't as elegant as the rest. Catalog was the first to go. It was the only thing islands were ever being used for, and therefore I felt that it had to be changed. But why was it being used so much? The answer was that it got people to their swamps faster, which was a direct form of card drawing (this happened even after we had changed it to its current text).

The solution was to take the options away from the player playing the Island. This turned into a mini-Fact or Fiction variant, the only difference being you revealed three cards instead of five. Unfortunately, this didn't solve the problem; in fact, it made it worse. So, we decided to tone down the blue card draw and went down the simple route. We changed this to Opt. It still gave the player a chance to find the spell they were looking for, but it wasn't so good that this was the only use for it.

And so, with that we arrived at what is now the current rules set for “The Land Game” in Arizona.

Swamp
Creature: 2/2, Pay 3 life: +1/+1 until end of turn.
Dark Banishing (instant): Destroy target non-swamp creature.
Dark Whispers (sorcery): Draw 2 cards, lose life equal to the number of cards in your hand.

Mountain
Creature: 2/2, Haste
Shock (instant): 2 Damage to target creature or player.
Earthquake (Sorcery), X=3: Deal 3 damage to each player and each creature without flying.

Forest
Creature: 3/3
Mini-Symbiosis (instant): Two target creatures get +1/+1.
Giant Growth (instant): Target Creature gets +3/+3.

Plains
Creature: 2/2, First Strike
Healing Salve (instant): Prevent the next 3 damage to a creature or gain 3 life.
Chastise (instant): Destroy target attacking creature. Gain life equal to its power.

Island
Creature: 2/2, Flying
Muddle the Mixture (instant): Counter target non-creature spell.
Opt (instant): Look at the top card of your library. You may put it on the top or bottom of your library. Draw a card.

Now, this is of course just the basic game. I've thought about adding some other options, like taking two of each land away and adding ten non-basic lands that could be used as artifacts. Also, to add some more power and play decisions, add in gold cards. How, you ask? A player casts an island and a forest together and plays it as Mystic Snake. Combine that forest and mountain for a Raging Kavu (and seriously, think of how good that is given the rules of the game).

I'll leave that up to you. Personally, I like to keep it simple so that wherever I go I can teach new players the game with ease.

Through all this I've learned that people really shouldn't be so critical of the development team at Wizards of the Coast. I've spent almost two years developing The Land Game, and I still make changes to it periodically as we discover more about balancing it as a format. Wizards does the same thing, but with hundreds of cards every couple of months. I was only looking at fifteen cards. If I can make mistakes with those fifteen cards, I can forgive a few oversights for a couple hundred.

A couple of thanks go to the people who helped me with this game:

• Ray Powers: For taking me to Pro Tour: San Diego
• Jay Webb: For introducing me to Ray Powers and helping me develop the game.
• Ben “Alphabitz” Blier and Mike Bahr: Who were present for the initial late night development.
• Those eight Asian guys: I wish I had been able to get your names so I could give proper credit, but thanks nonetheless.
• Steve Ward, Mike Clark, Mike Girard, Brad Webb: For humoring me when I told them this game was fun.

* - Incidentally, this is also the card text I had always wanted to submit for either a “You make the card” or an Invitational card. It would be a sorcery that cost one black mana.