Oversoul
The Tentacled One
And there are no situations where that doesn't work as perfectly as you'd like it to?Spiderman said:If you're building a deck that's heavy on the double casting cost, you simply include more of that color or add cards such as the fetch lands to increase your chances of getting that double mana on the second turn, if that's your goal.
What if I'm building a blue and white deck and I think Fork would go well in it, but I don't use many mana sources that can produce red? Maybe I splash a bit of red for Fire/Ice and have some red sideboard cards. Fork simply isn't going to work here. I can't afford to invest in the red mana necessary to play Fork, as it would compromise the rest of my deck. I'm also not going to just add more red cards, because that ruins the deck. Well, now I could just use Twincast, but in the past, the only reasonable solution would be to exclude Fork and find something else to use instead.
Hymn to Tourach has proven itself many times in monoblack decks. It's a very good card, and yet it doesn't see much play in multicolored decks. If that's because multicolored decks don't want to make opponents discard cards, then why do such decks sometimes use Duress or Mind Twist? Hymn to Tourach is simply limited in the same way that Fork and Counterspell are.
Using multiple mana of the same color as a requirement for casting a spell provides a barrier (if it didn't, designers wouldn't bother with it). It's not an insurmountable barrier by any stretch of the imagination. In particular, black cards have sometimes been able to overcome it through Dark Ritual (Necropotence, with a triple black requirement, has seen play in several multicolored decks).