Burning Earth - Magic the Gathering

An inconvenient truth.

So, I am finally talking about M14 again, long after people have stopped caring. I've been combing recent decklists, seeing which cards are making an impact on Standard, because that and Limited are the extent of my competitive format following.

Burning Earth is a replacement for the classic Manabarbs, and there's debate over which one is better. Manabarbs affected all lands, which hurt your opponent more but also you more. Burning Earth limits the effect to nonbasic, which takes some of the heat off of you but also does less damage to your opponent. Also note both only work if they tap the land for mana. Activating a Moorland Haunt's ability won't trigger these guys, meaning you still get plenty of suffering from their effects.

Since this debate has been done to death over the internet, let's talk about something else, the flavor text. More specifically, the guy saying the flavor text, Shrazik the lavamancer. Shrazik is a new name, I checked Gatherer and the only card with Shrazik in their flavor text is this one. That yielding nothing, I looked up lavamancer. I know there is already one in existence, Grim Lavamancer,  but I was curious if there was more flavor text quoted by lavamancers. Turns out there is. Say hello to Matoc.

Back in the days of Odyssey (with a one-card extension into Onslaught), Matoc was the lavamancer the Magic press got quotes from, his words appearing on six cards total. After years of silence from the lavamancer community, Shrazik has decided to fill the old role of spokesman for the lavamancer community. For all we know, meaning I'm calling this canon until someone from Wizards contradicts me, Shrazik was trained by Matoc, or is his descendant. Here's hoping we hear from him again, as many times as we have heard from his master and/or father.