Overall I can live with three colour decks having relatively more strength than other kinds as a result of very high quantities of dual lands because it gives the best games. Three however will tend to bite you. Put a Launch Campaign behind a Pop-up Window or Caduceus and you will make some money no matter what the runner does! I am an active member of MTGSalvation’s forums, notably the Digital Rendering Thread, and I’m going to follow their guidelines and not talk about how to make these cards. So while your mana base has little change in consistency in going from 2 to 3 colours your access to powerful gold cards and synergies rises by about the largest possible margin (theoretically this should just increase ever more as you add colours but in practice and with 40 card decks you just start to run out of space to include all the power and synergy you might want). I almost never don’t run them (horrible horrible sentence, I’m sorry) if I am a two colour deck, the times I wouldn’t would be a red splash in a Gr ramp Structural Deck where I wanted maximum forests for other synergies and I can reliably fix with spells as well.

There after they are a little clumsier to lay but this is made more comfortable with the scry and a well worth it trade off. Turn one Mox plus Filter Land usually equates to casting whatever two drops are in your deck which is far less consistently so with any other land you could make. Not only because they are then powerful fixing from turn one but also because the draw back of Chrome and the Original Mox is that they usually only offer one colour of mana and can be a little restrictive on the casting of colour intense spells. The cube is a fast and powerful format, you want to be involved from the outset and you never want to be prevented from casting something because you couldn’t have the right mana at the right time. This time however blue has really powered up on the creature front and has a lot more decks that play dorks and wins by attacking. So, with the Refuges, over the history of my cube, seeing a comparable amount of play to the original tap lands yet offering a fairly similar seeming perk to the scry lands, why is it that the scry lands are so highly played?

They come untapped and ready for use, they provide two colours of mana themselves but in addition are able to convert another one of either of the two colours to the other. Yes, they might sometimes come into play tapped or not turn on your Kird Ape but this is a minor inconvenience compared to having a bounce land bounced or having only filter lands and colourless lands. Not only are these five lands perfectly good fixing but they come complete with a free, powerful and hard to kill threat. The three colour decks are a little more vulnerable to mana base disruption and the mana bases are harder to optimise so can turn out very clunky in a small draft where you see less cards. Trying to cast something actually useful off the back of a Thran Dynamo is substantially harder than it is with Gilded Lotus which means you actually do tend to pay four mana for the card rather than the pseudo two for Lotus. It helps you smooth out your mana and when it dies, you draw a card.

Then Refuges came along a few blocks back and put any chances of the original tap lands seeing play out to pasture. If tempo and curving out in the early turns is important to your deck then you should be playing your on colour pain land and no excuses! If the pain lands had basic land types or the shock lands did not then there would be basically nothing to chose between these two cycles of dual lands. Like Lightning Bolt and Ancestral Recall they are so painfully simple that there is little to say about them beyond their obvious goodness. Typically it is when you know you are facing a burny red deck that you think the Refuges are a good thing to add in, or perhaps you are running a few too many pay life black cards without enough life gain and you are getting scared! If played in a normal control deck they will just take a few hits for four while not attacking until they have enough to just alpha strike you.