Timberline Ridge

The depletion counter is a toll, and the depletion lands are where Wizards first tried charging it. Tap for red or green and you mark the land; the counter is removed at your next upkeep before you untap, so the land can be used every turn but always carries that lingering mark. The upkeep trigger that strips the counter sets the rhythm: the land alternates between live and dead, a metronome ticking between use and downtime. That alternation is the entire mechanic, and it reads as clumsy now because it predates the vocabulary that eventually solved the same problem more gracefully. The design team was wrestling with a real constraint: untaxed two-color fixing is too strong, so what should the tax be? Depletion answered with a recurring penalty the player pays again and again. The tapland and the painland later answered with friction you feel once (a turn of tempo, or two life) and then forget. Wizards settled on those cleaner solutions and never circled back to depletion as a fixing mechanic. What this land records is an early, honest attempt to price two colors out of one source before the design seam had been found, an idea Magic's designers would later refine into something smoother.