Avoiding Quicksilver Fountain

You haven't lived until you've played a 3+ person game of Magic where one guy is playing Quicksliver Fountain.

I guess the game needs cards like this. If only to make you remember why your decks used to pack so much artifact removal when no one was playing artifacts. Beacause these things come in cycles, and now finally we have traveled past the end and back to the beginning. You look at your cards and realize you can do nothing.

Now lets talk about the 3-way action.

When it's just you, your opponent and Quicksiler Fountain together in the same cozy room, things are hard enough. But with each new player the time for the Fountain to reset gets substantially longer. You might sit with all Islands for several turns while another player puts down one more emergency swamp or plains to cast that very important creature he's been holding.

A few notes I've come up with that everyone else probably knows.

1) If you are playing a 3 color "zoo" deck, you are probably completely hosed. You might as well start heating up the gravy boat.

2) Yes, the counters keep dropping until every land is an Island. Someone, anyone, drops one mountain, and the whole process goes around another turn.

3) It targets all non-Island lands, so even a Soaring Seacliff or Academy Ruins is not safe.

4) If Quicksilver Fountain is removed from play, the counters remain and the countered-lands still remain Islands. Much like lands continue to "burn" after Obsidian Fireheart leaves the table, so too do these lands remain "wet".

I suspect in an EDH game, a properly constructed mostly blue deck could have a field day with this card. Assuming the rest of the table restrained themselves from conducting an unrelenting vendetta of aggression against your defenseless form.

The deck I faced was a casual constructed beast, filled with 4 Fountains and 4 ever-hungry Giant Oysters to slow the game down even further.

In Tribute to this horrible artifact, my new "Lowlander" Deck is going to need some serious blue or non-colored power for the late stages of the game. Instead of turning over tri-colored spell after tri-colored spell I can't cast, I want the BIG BOMB waiting to be inevitably drawn once the Fountains and Oysters lock down the board.

And so looking through my collection there are 2 cards I can see sneaking in.

1. Emrakul the Aeons Torn. Fresh out of my Niv-Mizzet deck, since the loose central authority of the Highlander community decided to "ban" it. What a bunch of complainers. Except when they are doing ace preview commentary. But back to the ban-list…there will be no such high-handedness to disturb the perfect deckbuilding mastery of my "Lowlander" deck.

2. Eldrazi Conscription. Picked this baby up at the Rise of the Eldrazi pre-release. Never got to cast it then. In fact, I've never got to cast it period. So now its going in.

I'm going to have to come up with some low-cost threats to round out the rest of the deck. Things to do before I get to 8 or 15 mana. But that shouldn't be hard. 58 more cards to come!