Vivid Crag

The whole pitch of this cycle is that the fixing is metered, not free. A dual or a fetchland gives you its colors forever; this banks exactly two off-color taps before it settles into being a tapland that makes only red. The counter pool buys the rainbow at a steep premium: the land enters tapped, you hold two activations of any-color fixing, and once those are spent you have a worse Mountain still occupying a slot. The design tension is between spending the charge counters early to smooth an awkward opening hand and hoarding them for a specific splash you might never draw. Crucially, the any-color ability removes a counter as part of the cost, so the fixing is finite in a way Command Tower or a basic-typed dual never is; you cannot loop it, and nothing on the card reloads it. That finiteness is what kept the cycle honest in an era when untapped five-color fixing was scarce, and it is also why these lands curdle into liabilities in long games. The red-by-default base makes this the version that pairs naturally with aggressive or burn-leaning shells, where the early counters cover a secondary color and the deck expects the game to be over before the land outlives its purpose.