What effect will 3Sphere's restriction have on mana bases?

[Dante]

...and what effect will this have on SCG Chicago mana bases?

1. people's mana bases had been tweaked to include more basics, etc in response to 3sphere decks (wasteland isn't as effective).

2. the restriction leads to a power drop off for stax and 5/3, the two most popular decks which run 5 strips (wasteland won't be as numerous).

3. the restriction will lead to more combo decks (or at least more people trying combo), which don't use wasteland.  In addition, wastelands in control don't usually hit combo too hard, since they don't have the mana denial of stax (3shere, wire, smokestack, etc) to back it up.  (wastelands won't be as frequent or as effective).

4. many of the top drain decks don't use waste -  the slavers decks use maybe 1 strip, many oath builds seen in the top 8 don't use any or a full complement of wastelands.  Looking at the build that top 8'd at Syracuse plus Steve's latest build posted on SCG (which there will be copycats of), those decks had 1 wasteland between them.  Landstill seems to be the only "good" drain deck consistently running wastelands.  (wastelands won't be as frequent).

Looking at those points, on the surface it would seem ripe for decks to return to more duals for higher mana consistency over the stability of basics, but will a smart deckbuilder take that shift into account (ala Steve's mono-blue deck at Gencon)?  Or will the shift happen fast enough to matter at Chicago?  Or will it even happen?

Also, will Stax be able to survive without Trinisphere?  Kevin's winning decklist only had 3 maindeck, but 3 is a lot different from 1.

[Hi-Val]

I think we'll see a brief resurgence of Fish decks, probably U/W, that use Wastelands as well. They'll fill in the gap that was left with Workshop decks on the decline. Also, I think that a lot of workshop decks will still be around, riding the power of Crucible of Worlds. In sum total, I don't think that numbers of wastelands will change, only that the decks running them will. I think people will feel safe for a while and run bad manabases again, but we'll all drift back to the center again anyway.

[Lord of the Goats]

i haven't played in about a year so i may be a little out of the loop here, but....

i think it's highly probable that we'll actually see more wastes. the first, second, and 8th  place decks at syracuse all ran 5 strips and 3 crucibles. and while 2 of those did run trinisphere, i'm going to ignore that for the moment.

the second place deck is the one that i think we should look at. the deck clearly isn't optimal, and after watching the guy play for multiple rounds he wasn't a very good player (no offense to him personally).  the deck basically walked through the swiss by crucible/waste and plowing things.

crucible does more permanent damage than trinisphere imo.  yes, trinispere will lock people out of the game, but a lot of time it just stalls them for a few turns, they kill it, and that's all. by killing trinispere your opponent can then play moxen, and all the spells they've been holding so they get a couple of turns where they play a lot of spells. if on the other hand they kill a crucible, they still have very limited mana and can't go ape-shit. thus i feel it's valid to not ignore the "trinispere decks".

as for mana bases, i think that we may see a lot of decks running 5 strips and crucible... and a lot of decks that are prepared for that... and of course a lot of decks that aren't.