Urza's Tower
 
My first encounter with Urza's Tower was even longer ago than my first encounter with Kird Ape, which I alluded to in this space last July. It was also under an opponent's control - Chronicles had just come out, and I was a follower of core sets (I still am, in fact). I think the guy only owned one of each of the "pieces", and got them all together about as often as you might expect. We liked how evocative the pieces were, and how they hinted at things going on that made this multiverse different from other fantasy settings, but I think we didn't know how to use them as much as later generations would.
 
Actually, to be perfectly honest, I'm still kind of in two minds about the Urza lands now. On the one hand, it's hard to feel more powerful than you do when you have them together. Sol Ring produces two mana for a mana cost of one, and the Tower here produces three for a cost of, technically, zero. But how do you get them all together? If you have four of each, that's already about half your land base or more, which probably pushes out a lot of color-intensive cards and a few cards that aren't especially intensive by comparison. You can play blue's mass card-drawing and green's efficient land-searching, but when you play enough of either of those, you get an advantage with or without the Urza lands - and when you do have them all, what are you really going to use them to cast? A huge Fireball or a dragon is the easy answer, but you could do so just as easily (and sometimes more easily) with just regular lands, either mass-drawn with blue or searched with green.
 
Ironically, the answer to the best use for these most ancient of mana-producers may come from something that's sort of hyper-modern in design: the Eldrazi. An entire tribe of extremely expensive, extremely devastating cards that are mostly colorless spells seems tailor-made for the Urza lands.
 
Constructed: 3/5
Casual: 4/5
Limited: 3/5
Multiplayer: 3/5
EDH/Commander: 3/5