The template installers don't do anything other than extracting the files to the correct location. If they don't work, try doing it manually. If you can't find the correct files, maybe I can upload them from my installation.
Of course you dont need mana elves to make this card viable. Its damn powerful already.
But there is this lil synergy:
If you cast turn 1 Elvish Mystique & turn 2 this card by spending 1 mana from a land & 1 Mana from the mana elf, your turn 3 will only have 1 land, that stays tapped. If you now play your 3rd land, youd have 2 untapped lands & a mana elf = 3 Mana turn 3.
Thats a damn nice trick to evade the Snakes disadvantage & also consisting of already playable cards d:)
You make your land unusable in one turn so that it isn't unusable on another turn.
I just want to kindly say that Mark Rosewater's opinions have almost no authority with me whatsoever.
I personally believe that the man has been designing Magic: the Gathering entirely blind for years, and fails to possess any dynamic understanding of game and its scientific dynamics. This belief majorly extends to Richard Garfield as well, although I'd say he seems to have a keener sense of theoretical understanding towards certain fun factors of gaming, and this gives him the edge to blindly implement something beneficial now and again. Yet from the very beginning, it's clear to me that the man himself also designed Magic entirely blind, and to this day has achieved no greater understanding towards the scientific details of aspects such as the flow of the cards, the nature of effects based on how they specifically interact with the game, the balance of power based on that principal understanding, and the need for equality (balanced by flavor) which should be the aspect that ties the entire game together and brings it full circle.
Mark Rosewater is just the same, he rambles on a lot about color restrictions, and speaks vaguely on power-level, but never does he articulate upon the intricacies of the game and its scientific dynamics. In fact, he goes so far into the blind devotion of his color separation theories, that his design schematics produce lopsided balances of power between colors set and set (extending all the way to the legacy and vintage formats themselves).
With that said, I hope you can bear with me when my design (which embodies the understanding of these scientific details) attempts to correct and restore the balance of power and interactivity to where it should be.
After digging through this postmodern gibberish, I got from your post that you think Mark Rosewater is too much of a color pie absolutist - which I guess is a critique one could make. But I don't know for sure if that's what you're saying, because I don't fully understand a single sentence of what you wrote.
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What a damn nice trick. Really impressive!
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