Active Volcano

This is one of those cards that's almost amazing. Almost.

There's two things holding this guy back -- blue permanents are literally the last thing any red deck has ever cared about in the history of Magic*, and the Island-bouncing ability has some serious diminishing returns attached. I can see it being backbreaking on Turn 1 on the play -- I'm thinking vs. a thresh deck in Legacy, maybe -- but it seems simply terrible at any point after that. If Big Brother Jace and Delver of Secrets insist on sticking around Legacy, we may even see this card. (Lies, we'd see Red Elemental Blast.)

*(Perhaps that was hyperbole. Chill, Propaganda and Collective Restraint have all peed in some red deck's Wheaties at some point, and Jace 2.0 rained on everyone's parade for two years.)

In the flavor department, I like most of what's going on here. The idea of blowing up an island with an eruption -- the kind of thing that'll eventually make a new island -- to temporarily deal with a blue mage's mana is very red. Similarly, leveling a whole island to smash a single blue thing living on it is also very red. I'm willing to do a little hand-waving over the fact that it's an either/or proposition. The one thing I do hate is that "Active Volcano" is a noun. Instant and sorcery names should either be verbs, like Shatter or Oxidize; or they should imply action with an adjective or adverb name, like Aleatory; or they should be nouns that describe items that are short-lived and full of energy, like Lightning Bolt. Active Volcano is none of those things; Volcanic Eruption would have been a better name if those dirty blue mages hadn't stolen it already.

So what's the grand change?

Yeah, nerfs. First, modular cards don't happen at common anymore. It's an uncommon mechanic now. That's a negligible downgrade, but it's still a downgrade. Second, it's a sorcery now. Bouncing lands at instant speed is generally verboten, it's generally blue, and it typically costs at least two colored mana. Red Elemental Blast and Pyroblast have always been better than this card, and they'll be miles better with this design.

But that's boring. Boring. It better meets today's sensibilities, but it still wouldn't be printed today, and it's still not that good.

For something a little more interesting, we could do this:

By tapping all Islands an opponent controls, rather than bouncing one, we not only give the card scalability, we let it stay instant. (Hell, with an ability like that, it demands instant.) I also don't like letting red blow up enchantments -- lands, dudes, planeswalkers and creatures I'm OK with, but not enchantments -- so I limited the first ability. Of course, red already has plenty of ways to nuke 'walkers (hello, Lightning Bolt), and colored artifacts are rare enough that blowing up a "blue artifact" sounds weird, so the simplest change was just to have the card blow up blue creatures. That's still a decent deal, and it gives a little room next to the "you can't play duders or counterspells for a turn or two" aspect the card has. Of course, the mana cost had to give a touch for all this. The original Active Volcano lives in the shadow of the undercosted Red Elemental Blast, hence the two options and the R cost, but I think that's a designer's trap that ought to be avoided.

Cost and abilities are a hard thing to nail down on a card like this. Red Elemental Blast is so iconic and so cheap that we don't have a ton of wiggle room. REB's a little like Lightning Bolt in that respect -- how many variations have we seen on that little card, for example? The major difference is that REB's ability would never see print today. Current thought -- which I agree with -- seems to be that a card's narrowness can't provide unlimited magnification of its power. In what universe would a one-mana, instant-speed Vindicate see print? If we made a card that powerful, hindered by its narrow scope of targets, won't it only be playable when its targets are meaningful and reliably present -- thus negating the drawback? The fact that REB has never seen serious play anywhere has more to do with the lack of good blue permanents in eternal formats, the cheaper (mana-wise) options of Force of Will, Daze and Pact of Negation, and the general weakness or strength of red, respectively, in Vintage and Legacy. In one, you have a single Mountain for Wheel of Fortune; in the other, you're curving out with Lackeys. In either format, there's really no space for REB.