Salt Marsh

The tapland tax in its plainest form: enter tapped, then produce one of two colors forever after. This is the gainland-and-bounceland era's middle child, the dual that asks for nothing (no life, no fetch, no second land in hand) and gives back nothing but the colors and a turn of tempo. It belongs to the cycle of allied-color taplands that core sets leaned on for years to fix two-color manabases at common, before the tango lands and the painless duals of later design pushed them out. The flavor of the restriction is honest: you pay the entire cost up front, on the turn it arrives, and from then on it is indistinguishable from an untapped dual. That makes the cost front-loaded rather than recurring, which is exactly why these aged out of serious play once Wizards decided a tapped land on turn one was a real liability worth designing around. As fixing, Salt Marsh is the Dimir entry, a blue-and-black source in one slot for decks that could afford to stumble once early. Its design says less about what it does than about a moment in the game's history when "enters tapped" was considered a fair price for a two-color source, and the long arc of land design has been about quietly walking that price back.