Concordant Crossroads

Another perennial favorite, this tidy little world enchantment has been a darling of green mages since '94. It's an unusual card, but I'm not sure it's fixably unusual -- or necessarily needs to be fixed. The primary problem?

It's symmetrical in the color most able to abuse it. That's a trait of white cards, not green ones. It offers haste to all creatures. That's a red ability, not a green one. Here, I'll show you the modern take on it:

Slap the World supertype on it and we could call it a day. The other problem with that? If green doesn't like superficially symmetrical cards, red hates them. Look at some of red's other symmetrical cards: Confusion in the Ranks, Furnace of Rath, Thieves' Auction. A quick breakdown:

Outside of Norin the Wary, this card's about as random as a non-random spell can get. There are short-term gains to be made with it -- which is red -- but it's hard to get and keep any sort of momentum with this thing out. Even in a Sligh-style deck, with small dudes that become worse as the game goes on, this card is worth about half of a Threaten; without some kind of haste support, it's just hard to snag and keep a threatening card. I suppose Confusion in the Ranks ends up favoring spells over permanents, long-term, which is vaguely red -- it's the color of burn, after all -- but blue does the stack one helluva lot better than red does. Similarly, it's very easy for the red player to get blown out with an unfavorable trade followed by a Disenchant or Naturalize; that's a pretty red tradeoff. Finally, the best creatures to be sitting on after a resolved Confusion in the Ranks aren't red -- they're shroud or hexproof, making them white, blue or green. (To make it worse, if you're running hexproof duders, you can give them away -- but you can't get them back.)

At first blush, this appears to be exactly the kind of spell that favors red immensely -- and, of course, it does hyper-charge the color's removal options. Shock is hard to disrespect when it's doming you for 4. But examine what it does for tramplers, first-strikers and flyers -- it makes them incredibly hard to block. Red's no slouch in the first strike department, but it's not exactly top dog there; in trample and flying, red's a positive loser. Sure, Furnace juices up your burn options -- but at four mana, it typically gives your opponent the first chance to dome you, and dome you hard, with something you can't really block. Again, this card is less about lopsided symmetry and more about a big gamble with a big payoff -- and that's why it's red, not white.

And this is the kind of randomness that red's really good at. It rewards clever players, it punishes greedy players and it really lets a loser get back in the game in a big way. Leaving alone the control-changing elements -- obviously red and blue's wheelhouse -- the reason this card's symmetry fits red, rather than white, is because white's schtick is that lopsided symmetry. Wrath of God is easy to break, as is Balance. White's cards are designed to be one-sided while seeming fair; Thieves' Auction actually is fair. Assume this card is white -- what's your grand game plan to break that card? Play no permanents? Slow-roll your land drops for four turns so you can ritual into Thieves' Auction and come out two creatures ahead? It's just not something you can engineer into a backbreaker -- but it can be engineered in multiplayer to take some smarmy frontrunner down a notch or two.

Let's go back to Mass Hysteria.

It shouldn't be red because:

• It's cheap enough that your duders can benefit from the haste first -- that's lopsided symmetry.
• With Sligh decks, this card heavily favors red -- you're giving up 1 or 2 damage up front by missing your 1-drop or turning your 2-drop into a 1-drop, but you're gaining a turn on every creature drop from then on out. With a good suite of burn, that's a scary proposition; on a good draw, Mass Hysteria is worth about 6 points of damage. Even against other Sligh-type decks, like white weenie, Mass Hysteria's better for the red deck because of its burn finish. Again, that's lopsided symmetry.

It should be red because:

• Haste is about as red as abilities get. No other color is as comfortable with it as red.
• By mid- to late-game, Mass Hysteria is typically scarier for the red deck than it is helpful. (This is less true in casual environments, where red can get its dragons online fairly reliably.) That plays into red's gambling nature.
• The haymaker nature of playing dragons into Mass Hysteria is redder than the card's one-sided symmetry. Sometimes, a card could go into multiple colors but doesn't -- either it's mostly one color, or the color bleed makes sense in the setting, or the designer's trying to put a new spin on the ability. In this case, red's been the color of all-in approaches like Disintegrate since the earliest days. Sure, Mass Hysteria's still showcasing lopsided symmetry at that point -- but it's also showcasing red going all in and swinging like a champ.

In the end, I feel like there's two ways to take Concordant Crossroads. The first is to just acknowledge its one-sided nature, price it appropriately, and run with it.

But that's boring. It also doesn't capture that lovely green flavor that dances around the edge of Concordant Crossroads and creatures gaining haste; I'd do something like this:

I feel it's important to keep the world type on this card. There's precious few world cards in Legends as is, and losing one would be noticeable.

Also, note that this would be the first gold enchantment in Legends. The only gold cards in the set were creatures; it wouldn't be until Dark Heart of the Wood, in The Dark, that we'd get a gold noncreature spell. (It's also one of the first enemy-color pairings.)