Michael Jacob G/B Aggro Loam deck from Grand Prix: Los Angeles has developed into a popular choice for this PTQ season, and its reputation is well-deserved. It’s a powerful archetype with a lot of potential, and so far it seems to have gained more from Conflux than any other archetype. For those of you who had a distaste for last week’s “less mainstream” (shall we say) deck, I suspect you will take a much stronger liking to this one.
Check it out:
Creatures (11)
Lands (26)
Spells (23)
- 3 Umezawa's Jitte
- 3 Engineered Explosives
- 3 Darkblast
- 4 Life from the Loam
- 3 Thoughtseize
- 3 Raven's Crime
- 1 Worm Harvest
- 3 Path to Exile
Sideboard
First, a quick look at the manabase. This is a fairly rudimentary adjustment, and it boils down to this:
-2 Twilight Mire
-1 Overgrown Tomb
-1 Golgari Rot Farm
+1 Plains
+1 Godless Shrine
+1 Temple Garden
+1 Windswept Heath
For the record, I was never a big fan of Twilight Mire in this deck. Whenever I drew it, I already seemed to have the Black mana I needed for Raven’s Crime, and I sometimes found myself having to do mana-floating contortions when I needed to get something as simple as GB out of a Twilight Mire and a Forest in the same turn. When I needed to split the mana up over multiple phases, I was out of luck. I was also rarely happy to see Golgari Rot Farm; as it’s been said before, “Loam decks don’t need help making land drops.”
The additional White producers are an obvious necessity to support Knight and Exile, and a fourth Windswept Heath makes more sense in the context of the extra Plains and the addition of Reliquary.
The maindeck has some more substantive changes:
+4 Knight of the Reliquary
+3 Engineered Explosives
+3 Path to Exile
-3 Bitterblossom
-3 Putrefy
-2 Slaughter Pact
-1 Darkblast
-1 Kitchen Finks
Broadly speaking, this is an adjustment of threats and an adjustment of answers, without changing the ratios of either. Reliquary replaces Bitterblossom (and then I cut a Finks to fit the fourth, which I’m still not positive is correct), Explosives replaces Putrefy, and Path replaces Slaughter Pact and one of the Darkblasts.
As with Twilight Mire, I have never thought four Darkblast was the right count for Loam’s maindeck. It’s doubtless the count you want against Elves! and Wizards and Faeries, but you rarely want to draw more than one against the Red decks, Affinity, and the mirror. Drawing two copies in those matchups can leave you with a blank for many turns, and you don’t want to draw any copies against TEPS, AIR, or Swans, which leads me to believe the fourth ought to start in the board.
Comparing Engineered Explosives to Putrefy, we see some benefits and some drawbacks. If you take it as a given that you will always have access to three colors for Explosives (which I think is reasonable), then the major downside cases for Explosives are:
• You want to blow up an animated manland (you can’t)
• You want to blow up your opponent’s Tarmogoyf but not your own (you can’t)
• You want to blow up something with a converted mana cost greater than three (you can’t)
• You want to surprise your opponent at instant speed (you can’t)
• You want to blow up something that costs two or three mana (it costs 1-2 more mana)
Then there are the downside cases for Putrefy:
• You want to blow up an enchantment (you can’t)
• You want to blow up multiple permanents at once (you can’t)
• You want to blow up a one-drop, but you want to pay the requisite three mana over multiple turns (you can’t)
• You want to blow up something with that costs zero mana (it costs one more mana)
The ability to blow up enchantments and multiple permanents is a huge plus for Explosives. One of Zoo’s best draws against Loam is the swarm of multiple Kird Apes, Wild Nacatls, and Mogg Fanatics, and Explosives seriously punishes that opening. (This is to say nothing of its abilities against Elves! and multiple Cranial Platings.) It’s also better at stopping Lotus Bloom, as it only requires that you keep two mana open, can kill two Blooms in one swipe, is immune to Remand, and does not add to the opponent’s Storm Count like an upkeep Putrefy does. Further, Explosives lets you remove Blood Moon (the big one), Threads of Disloyalty, opposing Bitterblossoms, and the occasional Astral Slide. It does this while retaining its ability to kill artifacts such as Vedalken Shackles, opposing Jittes, and Cranial Platings, just like Putrefy did.
Probably the third-most significant benefit of Explosives is the ability to play turn 1 Explosives for one. This is primarily a big play against Elves! and Zoo, where Putrefy’s sluggishness can get you in trouble on top of the fact that it can only kill one permanent at a time.
I prefer Explosives over Seal of Primordium against Blood Moon by a substantial margin; as long as you can get out two different basics before the Moon hits, you will have an answer to it in the form of Explosives, even if neither of those basics is a Forest (Blood Moon will provide you with Red mana for a third color). More importantly, it answers both Blood Moon and Magus of the Moon, and you can happily board in the full four Explosives against Red decks – if you draw more than you need, you just use the extras as creature removal.
The one downside to Explosives as an answer to Blood Moon and Shackles is that they will also blow up your Knights (and Finks, though that’s less damaging) if you already have them on the table. So far this has not resulted in a meaningful downside for me, as if I have had a Knight on the table with two basics out against Blood Moon or Shackles, I have been so far ahead on the board that I didn’t need to bother killing the Moon. Still, it could come up, and could be a real problem – so boarding 2 Explosives and 2 Seal of Primordium remains a reasonable way to hedge your bets.
As Loam already had a reasonable matchup against Zoo and a solid one against Elves!, you may want to relegate Explosives to the sideboard, depending on what flavors of Wizards and Faeries you expect at your PTQ. If Threads and/or Bitterblossom are not common, and especially if Sower of Temptation is heavily favored over Shackles, you will be unhappy more often than not to draw Explosives against that deck, and its upsides against the rest of the field may not be enough to overcome that if your field is Island-heavy enough.
This card has gotten mixed reviews so far, but I absolutely love it in this deck. A lot of it comes down to the format’s alternative spot removal:
• Terror is susceptible to Spell Snare and cannot target Demigod of Revenge, Dark Confidant, Tidehollow Sculler, Bitterblossom tokens, or any of Affinity’s creatures except Atog.
• Smother is susceptible to Spell Snare and cannot target Sower of Temptation, Glen Elendra Archmage, Venser, Frogmite, Myr Enforcer, Swans of Bryn Argoll, or Regal Force.
• Putrefy and Mortify and Slaughter Pact cost 50% more than either of the above alternatives, and three times as much as Path.
Path has none of the above drawbacks, is cheaper than any of those cards, and only comes with the relevant additional drawbacks of being more vulnerable to Spellstutter Sprite and giving the opponent a free Rampant Growth.
I think it’s abundantly clear that Path would be the undisputed king of spot removal spells in this format if not for the Rampant Growth effect, so let’s get into how much of a drawback that is.
Against Affinity, the difference is nonexistent because they don’t play basics. It’s close to nonexistent against All-In Red, as the additional benefit gained from being able to kill their creature on turn 1 (before, say, a turn 1 Deus can start munching on your lands) easily outweighs the downside of giving them a land. It’s a bit more relevant against Elves! because they can actually make use of the mana, but the ability to go about your turns while leaving only one mana up in case they go for it is an absolute godsend compared to having to leave two or three up.
As Adrian Sullivan mentioned earlier, my view on Path against Zoo is that it is absolutely incredible. Once you get to the midgame in a deck like Loam, Zoo’s opportunities to damage you with creatures drop off dramatically. You have big monsters on defense, and are cycling and Loaming like a madman, digging up more removal spells all the time. At that stage in the game, it’s all about trying to burn you out, and whether or not this plan is successful often hinges on how much damage the game’s earliest creatures were able to inflict on you.
A turn 1 Wild Nacatl is typically good for six or nine points of damage on his own, which is critical to getting you in burn range. When you hit him with a Path to Exile right away, and instead he gets in for zero points, you have dealt a crushing blow to Zoo. Make no mistake. If the opponent follows that up with a turn 2 Keldon Marauders plus a second Nacatl (thanks to the bonus land you gave him), then yes, you’d have probably preferred Terror to Exile, but even if you get Marauders plus Mogg Fanatic instead, you’ve probably saved yourself three to five life on the spot. And when they don’t have a second one-drop to play on turn 2, you’ve probably saved yourself six to nine life.
The other potential downside to giving Zoo an extra land is that it helps ensure that they will cast Molten Rain or Blood Moon early, but I have not found the difference between a turn 2 Molten Rain (with no creatures out) and a turn 3 Rain to be substantially different, leaving only Blood Moon as the scary scenario.
Wizards is the matchup where the Rampant Growth hurts you the most, as you are often removing a creature with Path that you could have just as easily gotten with a Darkblast for the same amount of mana. However, this is also the matchup in which you will encounter 4 Spell Snare, and aiming a removal spell at Sower of Temptation only to have it thwarted by a counter is pretty much a stone-cold catastrophe. And although Putrefy is more resistant to Spellstutter Sprite, it is far more vulnerable to Mana Leak, not to mention the fact that you will want to use that moment where Wizards is low on mana from having main-phased a four-cost Sower to try and resolve something good; spending three mana on your own turn (as you generally will) to off that guy is not conducive to exploiting this moment of weakness.
Overall, I am a big fan of the Exile.
As an animal, Knight of the Reliquary is approximately Doran in this deck. He costs 3, and he averages around a 5/5 when you cast him. If it’s right on turn 3, he’s more likely to be a 4/4 or smaller, but later in the game he’s more likely to be a 6/6 or bigger. In other words, he’s roughly Tarmogoyf-sized, but for one more mana (which is arguably an upside over Bitterblossom when you are playing Engineered Explosives and opponents are playing Spell Snare), in exchange for the ability to tutor up lands and to vastly outclass opposing Goyfs in a midgame topdeck war. As a bonus, he is almost always a good bit smaller when the opponent successfully steals him than he was on your side.
The other nice part about him is that he can pump himself up if he is too small. The fastest way to do this is by searching up Ghost Quarter, since it can confer an additional +1/+1 or +2/+2 (if you’re willing to shoot one of your own lands with it) on top of the +1/+1 for sacrificing the Forest or Plains, if need be.
It’s interesting that you can use Loam in conjunction with his activated ability to manage the size of your Knight and your manabase simultaneously. For example, if you block a Tarmogoyf with your Knight and activate it in order to survive the attack, you might actually want to run the Ghost Quarter Suicide Mission before combat damage, using the +3/+3 to make the Knight larger than the Goyf, then Loam some of those lands back to rebuild your manabase once the Tarmogoyf is dead and it’s safe to shrink the Knight back down.
Speaking of Knight and Loam, defending with Reliquary in general can be a bit of a balancing act when you have Loam. Say you end your turn with two mana open and want to use it up to Loam back some goodies. On the one hand, this will save you mana, but on the other hand, it will lead you to pass with a -3/-3 Knight on defense. This situation comes up a decent amount of the time, but you can dodge it when the Knight is on offense by either doing all your Loaming before or after combat, leaving him plenty large when he’s in the red zone.
4 Loxodon Hierarch
3 Choke
3 Extirpate
2 Pithing Needle
1 Darkblast
1 Engineered Explosives
1 Kitchen Finks
Darkblast, Explosives, and Finks are all fourth copies for the matchups in which they shine. I did not see a need to modify Choke or Extirpate, but given the popularity of Relic of Progenitus, I think the Pithing Needle count deserves to go up to two. I would draw the line there, as drawing multiple copies is poor except in the specific case where they deal with the first one. Given that Explosives works as an answer to Blood Moon, Shackles, Lotus Bloom, and Affinity’s bad things, I don’t think Seal of Primordium is worth the slots anymore.
The biggest change here is the 4 Hierarchs instead of 3 Damnation and 2 Baloth. This has everything to do with my fetching strategy against Blood Moon. When your colors are just Green and Black, fetching out two Forests is not too unreasonable, nor is fetching out two Swamps. When you have three colors, your priorities shift to getting out one Forest, one Plains, and one Swamp, so replacing the GG and BB requirements with just GW – which you want out anyway – gives you more plays if they stick a Moon.
Obviously Hierarch is a great man to have against any Red deck, and in my experience the Baloth-Mutavault situation comes up a lot less often than the situation where you need to sac your Baloth because you need four life or else you are going to die. As far as Damnation goes, I would easily prefer Hierarch against any Red deck, and as four-mana sweepers go, I would rather have (and already do have) Engineered Explosives against Affinity and Elves!
A Game in the Life
I’m going to go up against Owen Turtenwald winning Wizards list from the most recent Madison PTQ, which Mike Bernat also used (or rather, an extremely near copy) to Top 8 the same event.
Creatures (13)
Lands (25)
Spells (22)
I lose the coin flip and see:
Forest
Temple Garden
Godless Shrine
Polluted Delta
Path to Exile
Kitchen Finks
Knight of the Reliquary
This would be a fine hand in Standard (and how troubling is it that all the business spells in this hand are Standard-legal?), but in Extended it is lacking. If my opponent is TEPS, Affinity, or Wizards, they will wipe the floor with me. Only if I am up against a Red deck or maybe the mirror might this hand be reasonable; I cannot keep it. The next six:
Windswept Heath
Barren Moor
Thoughtseize
Darkblast
Umezawa’s Jitte
Engineered Explosives
This is on the messy side, but it is much better than five and has decent potential. Keep.
Wizards keeps as well, and leads with Island and Ancestral.
I draw Life from the Loam. What’s my first-turn play here? I can either play Barren Moor tapped or play the Heath and potentially cycle the Moor down the line.
Since my opponent is clearly Wizards, I don’t have to decide right away. I definitely want to play Thoughtseize on turn 1 here, and do not anticipate needing two mana on turn 2; if I don’t topdeck a land, I can absolutely choose to play the Barren Moor then instead.
I crack Windswept Heath for Overgrown Tomb (my hand includes Loam, Black cards, and no White cards) and cast Thoughtseize, Lava Axing myself on the first turn of the game. I see:
Riptide Laboratory
Mana Leak
Engineered Explosives
Umezawa’s Jitte
Vendilion Clique
I am not especially threatened by the Jitte, since I can dispatch it with my Explosives before playing one of my own. His Engineered Explosives can take out my Jitte, which is more troublesome, but so can Mana Leak and Vendilion Clique. Ordinarily I would assume I could save my Loam from the Clique thanks to my cycling land, but since I might have to play it tapped (or I might not draw a second land with which to cast Loam in time), I don’t think that’s safe. I’ll take the Clique in order to keep my Loam safe.
The opponent takes a time counter off Ancestral and plays Riptide Laboratory.
I draw Kitchen Finks. How good is making my second land drop here? I know my opponent has nothing threatening unless he topdecked it, he has an Ancestral coming in soon, but even if I have the land drops to cast as many spells as I please, it’s going to be my one Darkblast against his whole horde – and he’s already got the Riptide Lab with which to recur Spellstutter Sprites to shut down that plan. I think my only shot here is to go full speed ahead trying to set up Loam and a cycling land.
I cycle Barren Moor into another Loam and pass.
The opponent fades Ancestral down to two counters and plays a Mutavault.
I draw Forest, play it, and attempt Loam. It is countered by Mana Leak.
Ancestral goes down to one counter, the opponent plays Umezawa’s Jitte and a second Riptide Lab, and knocks me to 13 with Mutavault.
Do I dredge Loam here, given that I have another in my hand? Well, I know my opponent’s hand is Engineered Explosives and one random card, so if I dredge into Raven’s Crime, the best I can do is make him discard Explosives. Seems weak. I might dredge into another land, which would be decent, but not broken, as I am more limited by my mana on the table than by my cards in hand… or is that true? Thinking ahead to next turn, what I want to do most is to just play Engineered Explosives to kill my opponent’s Jitte (with mana open to play my own Jitte and Legend Rule it away if the Explosives is countered), and then play Kitchen Finks on the following turn. Nowhere in there do I have time to cast Life from the Loam, but I sure do want to hit four mana. Dredging seems like the best option here, as it maximizes my chance of seeing a third land.
I dredge, flipping over a second Explosives, Tarmogoyf, and another Jitte. I Loam back my two lands. Do I play Barren Moor or Windswept Heath here? If I play the Heath and crack it for, say, Godless Shrine, I will take three damage and drop to 10, meaning I will be at no more than 8 after next turn’s attack. However, I will also have Kitchen Finks coming up, and against an opponent with no Faeries in play (save for Mutavault) and who has already expended a Mana Leak, the odds that he will not draw one off the Ancestral are not too bad. That plan seems to have more merit than the play-Barren-Moor plan, due to the aforementioned benefits of having the cycling land in my graveyard rather than in play.
I certainly want to crack the Windswept Heath now; if I wait, I risk having it Stifled next turn, which would be extremely bad for me. By the same token, I also want to cycle the Moor now; missing out on a land drop next turn due to a Stifled fetchland would be miserable as well. I fetch Godless Shrine, cycle Barren Moor (I don’t dredge here, since I am hoping for a topdecked land), and draw Polluted Delta. Ding!
Ancestral goes off for my opponent. He attacks with Mutavault without equipping Jitte, and plays another Mutavault, then passes while representing a counter.
I draw Worm Harvest. Before I do anything else, I want to see if he is going to Stifle my fetchland activation. I play the Delta and crack it; it resolves. I fetch out Swamp. Now it’s time to go for Explosives. I play them, and in response he activates Mutavault and counters with Spellstutter Sprite. That’s no big deal; I play my Jitte and clear his out.
I pass the turn with four lands out to my opponent’s five, four cards in each of our hands, and with him having a Spellstutter Sprite and two Mutavaults out. My opponent cracks Delta for Watery Grave on my end step.
He plays Polluted Delta and cracks with the team for five, taking me to four.
I draw Path to Exile. That’s well-timed; as long as he doesn’t have a counter (and I’m dead either way if he does), I can get a two-for-one on his Mutavaults if he alpha strikes into Kitchen Finks next turn. I cast Finks and they resolve, taking me up to 6. I have Godless Shrine untapped, so if he decides to only attack with Spellstutter Sprite I can use Darkblast on it instead of Path.
He plays a third Mutavault and then casts Sower of Temptation on my Kitchen Finks. He wisely declines to attack with Mutavault in case I have Path, and instead beats with just Spellstutter Sprite. I Darkblast it to save life; I’ll Exile the Sower next turn when I can afford to pay for Mana Leak if need be.
Before deciding to draw or dredge, I need to think: how is this turn going to play out? I technically do not need to cast Exile here, because I can use two Darkblasts on the Sower instead. That’s much better if I can pull it off, but if he has Mana Leak, I am shooting myself in the foot. Particularly against a deck like Faeries, where Darkblast can kill most of their creatures by itself, it’s not exactly a “waste” of an Exile to cast it here, so I’m going to play it safe. Still, I do want Darkblast so that I can use it to kill a Mutavault in two turns.
I Exile the Sower on my upkeep (so I can see if it resolves before deciding to dredge) and it resolves; the opponent fetches out an Island, his eighth land. I dredge Darkblast, flipping two Windswept Heath and a third Loam. I Loam back Delta, Heath, and Barren Moor, then play Polluted Delta and crack it for Swamp, and pass.
The opponent immediately swings with the three Mutavaults. I try to Darkblast one, to see what happens before declaring blockers. It is met with Spellstutter Sprite. I block one Mutavault with Finks, which die and take me back up to 3 life after combat. He plays a Secluded Glen tapped and passes. I cycle Barren Moor to dredge Darkblast on his end step (I want it for Spellstutter Sprite, if nothing else), and flip Tarmogoyf, Barren Moor, and Thoughtseize.
I have some more thinking to do on my upkeep. I know that one of the two cards in his hand is Engineered Explosives, so I cannot play a defensive Worm Harvest here or I will die. Instead, my best bet is to go for multiple Darkblasts. I dredge Loam, flipping Knight of the Reliquary, Polluted Delta, Barren Moor. I Darkblast Spellstutter Sprite, then play Heath and crack it for Forest. I use my two Forests to Loam back all three Barren Moors. I cycle one of them into Darkblast right away, to remove an out for my opponent in the form of a topdecked Stifle. The dredge flips Explosives, Goyf, and the other Delta. I pass with two Black open, Darkblast in hand, and two Barren Moors to go with it. That’s not enough to kill a Mutavault, but it’s enough to keep me alive.
The opponent draws and swings with the Mutavaults. I block one and Darkblast the other, and he uses Riptide Lab to bounce the one that is about to die, with damage on the stack. He replays the Mutavault and passes.
I cycle Barren Moor on end step and hit Knight of the Reliquary (!)
I dredge Life from the Loam on upkeep, flipping Tranquil Thicket, Ghost Quarter (finally!), and the other Thicket. I cast the Knight with Mana Leak mana up, and it resolves. It is a 13/13 here, and I can pump it to 14/14 at a moment’s notice by cycling Barren Moor. I cast Loam (also resolves) to retrieve Ghost Quarter, and immediately play and sacrifice it to take out a Mutavault while he is tapped too low to protect it with Riptide Lab. I pass with Godless Shrine open and Barren Moor in hand.
He untaps and plays Sower on my Knight. Ordinarily this would not be much of a setback, as I can Darkblast it to death next turn, but I am at one life and he has a Mutavault, so it just attacks me to death and that’s the game.
…
This wasn’t the greatest example of the new cards, but at least they all came up in my limited non-dredge draw steps. You can imagine that a 14/14 would have ended the game in short order had I the chance to untap with it, but I got too low on life and couldn’t stabilize in time. The Explosives were fine for purposes of Jitte removal, although they just drew a counter this time around. Path to Exile was excellent because I was so land-light, and allowed me to play around a Mana Leak that would have ended me if he’d had it. He didn’t end up making use of the extra land I gave him.
Actually, this game was an excellent example of how this deck loses game 1 of the Faeries matchup: quick beats. You actually have inevitability over them in game 1, as once the game goes on long enough you will Raven’s Crime their hand away and have recurring Darkblast and Ghost Quarter at the ready for whatever they might topdeck. The trick is surviving to that point, and to that end, the Faeries matchup is often about killing their men at every opportunity as though they were a plain beatdown deck. I have definitely taken my entire fourth turn to play Explosives on three after my opponent has Vendilion Cliqued me, and ended up winning because of it.
In fact, I might have won this game had I just played Barren Moor initially instead of cycling it. True, he might then have overwhelmed me with card advantage from Ancestral, but I might at least have had a better shot.
Overall, Conflux seems to have given G/B a shot in the arm to the tune of more efficient spot removal, a maindeckable sweeper (of sorts) that offers a flexible answer to Blood Moon effects as well as Vedalken Shackles, and an enormous late-game fatty that doubles as an effective blocker and utility creature in the early game. Whether or not that translates into a deck that can give the Wizardly menace a run at the crown remains to be seen, but I suspect we will find out pretty quickly.
See you next week!
Richard Feldman
Team :S
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