Blog Elemental – Time to Land
June 21, 2004
This week I’m in a decidedly Green Mood. Beware.
I have been thinking about a deck idea I mentioned last week when contemplating Crucible of Worlds. I said:”I want a Green thirty-land Land Deck using Stalking Stones and Blinkmoth Nexuses as the only unstoppable ‘creatures.'”
And you know what? I do. I really do.
I have already written about my love of Land Decks[http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=mtgcom/daily/jm43]. I was inspired way-back-when by a tournament deck called Bad.dec that used an enormous pile of land, along with Wake of Destruction and Crater Hellion, often winning with”man-lands” Treetop Village and Ghitu Encampment. Since then about every block or so I try to make a deck based around getting lots of land into play.
Here is today’s Land Deck musing…
The Unstoppable Man-Lands
Standard-legal
4 Wayfarer’s Bauble
4 Pyroclasm
4 Sylvan Scrying
4 Trade Routes
4 Crucible of Worlds
4 Oblivion Stone
4 Fabricate
4 Reap and Sow
4 Blinkmoth Nexus
4 Mirrodin’s Core
4 Stalking Stones
4 Wooded Foothills
6 Island
3 Forest
3 Mountain
Okay, so it’s more Blue than Green and turns out to have twenty-eight lands, not thirty. The land, too, makes me a little squeamish. I don’t know if the mana-mix is correct and I struggle with how much pain a deck like this can bear (using repeated fetchlands in addition to things like City of Brass and Grand Coliseum). This strikes me as one of those deck ideas that needs to be tried out to judge its viability even as a casual deck.
There’s still a lot to like, though. Fetchlands are land-thinning machines. Blinkmoth Nexus and Stalking Stones become unstoppable Frankensteinian monsters. Board-sweepers Pyroclasm and Oblivion Stone leave your man-lands alone. If you open up a broader card pool, cards like Barbarian Ring, Treetop Village, Rath’s Edge, Mishra’s Factory, Quicksand, Strip Mine, and Gemstone Mine present a dizzying number of options for a Crucible of Worlds deck.
Should I include cards like Fireball? Maybe. But when I first create a deck around a particular concept, I try to push that concept as much as possible to see what happens. In this case, it’s important to me that man-lands be the primary win condition. After all, what’s the point in making a Land Deck if I can’t win with land?