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A Gray One?

Wouldn't you know it, just as soon as I publish math for the four new bases, SWU adds a fifth. I'm gonna try to make this fast: there's no mathematical card advantage or disadvantage to playing this deck. If you'd like to know the numbers, you can check the previous article ("Call it Swudespire"). The Lake House will give you the same odds of drawing as the "standard" deck in that article.

That said, there are a couple of things we can learn from/about Lake Country:
1) The Life value of access to an Aspect
2) The Resource value of 4 Life

Clearly, the lost value for getting access to a single color Aspect is four Life in this case. But it's worth remembering that losing something is not necissarily valued at the same rate as gaining something. For example, in JTL the red base gains you consistency and the green base loses you consisitency. Even though they use directly comparable gains and losses, the gains and losses are assigned different Life values; Red shrinks your deck by five cards for three Life loss, while green grows your deck by ten cards for the same amount of Life gain. So while losing access to a color Aspect may gain you four Life, getting access to a third color Aspect would in the future would very likely cost you a different amount (more, I hope). The other thing we can look at is the life gain vs. resourse spending in a mono-color deck. Double Blue Iden, for example could play Lake House for 4 extra Life, but their Vigilance (and other BB cards) would cost 2 more. While all of the cards in SWU are currently available to any deck, the resource tax can be really crippling in many cases. For your convenience, I'm listing all of the double Aspect cards currently in the game below (as of 2.18.2025):
Finally, we can definitely consider decks and cards where losing a color Aspect hurts less than it might normally. The two big contenders here are Nala Se and Hera Syndula. If you stick to clone or spectre cards, respectively, the downside of Lake Country is reduced. There are also cards like The Darksaber and Omega that can reduce the penalty in less universal ways. Finally, cards with alternate costs like Bamboozle can be played while ignoring the Aspect tax. Overall, I don't think this card is going to see a lot of play in limited or constructed environments, but I've been wrong before.

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