Volcanism

[PucktheCat]

The one, subtle difference is that Ghost Quarter also eats up your land drop for the turn.  I think that it is a larger penalty than most people consider upon first observation.

Strip Mine is a much more powerful card than Sinkhole, so I would say that the land drop argument is pretty weak.  A land drop is less of a cost than two mana most of the time.

[Marco]

Y'know, I didn't care much for this card initially, but now I kind of like it as a nice complement to Ghost Quarter...

[dandan]

Volcanism is RR in the colour that is strongest at LD. It is a conditional LD spell, good against the right decks but very bad against the wrong ones and probably not enough of a hoser to be an automatic SB card. So we can call it a metagame card.

Ghost Quarter is a land. That is huge. Mana doesn't win you games but not having mana sure loses you them! Any colour can run it. So many decks would love to run 20-22 mana sources and up to 40 business cards but have to run 24-26 mana to avoid the fatal mana screw. Running utility lands is a pretty good way to up the land count. Note that it also 'protects against LD by hitting your own lands and can kill a tapped land to get you an untapped one of the right colour. That was one of the features of Vocanism I was a bit concerned about (tutoring).

I don't want to get overly into Volcanism vs Ghost Quarter except to say that Wizards have decided that conditional landkill can be cheap and that any colour can now 'tutor' for basic land using a land sacrifice - which were my (slight) ojections to Volcanism. Given that I concluded that we shouldn't have any problems with the power level/mechanic of Volcanism and it seems that nobody has any. I think Volcanism has survived without any objections for a lot more than the 24 clock required!

[Ephraim]

Closed and added.