You Lika The Juice? - Hideaway Adventures!

“[Expletive]! I got another crappy Hideaway land!”

How many times have you either heard or uttered this phrase whenever a pack was opened in the time leading up to Worlds? I’m

willing to bet it was at least a fair amount; those Hideaway lands seemed to be the very opposite of hidden when you were

desperately hoping to crack open a big money Garruk Wildspeaker or Thoughtseize. I’m willing to bet that a fair amount of

Hideaway lands used to be found in the stacks of commons and uncommons tossed to the side in the wake of drafts, so low was

most people’s opinions of the cycle since Lorwyn’s release.

All that has changed, though… well, sorta.

First off, Patrick Chapin testing crew has unleashed the new iteration of Dragonstorm, with the “Gassy Knoll” as

conspicuously much more awesome than nearly anyone had imagined. Suddenly, everyone’s scrambling through their trade binders

and trash rares in the bottom of their closet to avoid having to pay for the now $5 rare as they netdeck the new old combo

deck.

While everybody knows the Top 8 decklists from Worlds — including the Dragonstorm list — I’m willing to bet that the

other Hideaway land kicking around Worlds got a little less notice unless you paid close attention to Rich Hagon Worlds recap last

week, or Chris Millar’s recent House of Cards.

Both of them mentioned Aaron Forsythe gunslinging deck, a 5 color Elemental deck featuring another Hideaway land, this time

Mosswort Bridge. Aaron’s shenanigans were also mentioned in the Card of the Day (Mosswart Bridge) on December 11th. In case you missed Chris’ column, here’s

Aaron’s deck:

5c Elementals

Aaron Forsythe

Test deck on 12-23-2007

Standard

Creatures (28)

Lands (23)

Spells (9)

Aaron apparently pulled off a big splashy play by casting a Nova Chaser on an empty board, and when his opponent let it

resolve he put the Champion trigger on the stack and activated his Mosswart Bridge, since Nova Chaser provides 10 power all

by itself. Luckily, the Bridge had an Elemental hidden away, so the Nova Chaser Championed it and got to smash in for 10.

First impressions die hard, and I bet many people reading this account thought it cute, a two-card combo of sorts with Bridge

and Nova Chaser, but not enough to budge from the “Hideaway Lands suck… except for Spinerock Knoll” that everyone is locked

into. Witness our good man Sean McKeown this past

Friday; he’s usually pretty open to new, cutting edge ideas, and yet he pretty much turns his back on the potential of

the four other Hideaway lands:

“Looking at the Hideaway lands, it’s very easy to misinterpret their values. The Blue one is reasonably easy to trigger in

Limited, but a good deal closer to useless in sixty-card formats, while the Black one more or less seems terrible all

around… The Green one is just such a large number, in either format, shenanigans with Nova Chaser aside… which leaves us

with Spinerock Knoll and Windbrisk Heights as the two we might ever expect to really fire off. Windbrisk Heights is limited

by the fact that attacking with White creatures is generally a poor play, and even when it isn’t that theoretical White

attack deck will rarely be willing to skip a turn’s worth of aggressive mana development to maybe get a card out of it later…

In sixty-card formats you have to face opposition like Tarmogoyf and Damnation blunting the weenie swarm or dampening the

effectiveness of an all-out attack, all while board development to get three men is slowed by skipping your one-drop. That

leaves us Spinerock Knoll, easily laughed off as one of the worst Hideaway lands (and only spared that title because of the

train wreck that is the “Hellbent” Hideaway) by everyone in the world before Worlds, and now steadily an object of desire for

deckbuilders everywhere.”

I’m willing to bet that many people feel very similar to Sean’s assessment, and yet I can’t help but think that we really

ought to learn the lesson of Spinerock Knoll; these lands are quite powerful in the right situations, and we could be missing

out on some real dynamite by not investigating further. After all, these lands came about from Forsythe’s “hidden treasure”

ideas; do you find that initial gold piece in the sand, praise your good fortune and keep on walking, or do you drop down and

dig to see if there’s more to be found?

Aaron wrote about the Hideaway lands in his Working for

Peanuts column:

“The Hideaway lands, like Mosswort Bridge, are meant to capture some of the “hidden treasure” feeling of the original

mechanic. But now, instead of just having a creature explore, each treasure comes with a mission attached – a mission you

need to complete to access the treasure.”

With a shiny Spinerock Knoll gold piece in our pocket, let’s go digging for more treasure, shall we?

First, let’s evaluate the Hideaway mechanic in general. What benefits can we get from the card?

#1: You may play the removed card without paying its mana cost. Considering that the activation cost is effectively just

two mana, you could really get a huge discount here. Think about it – abilities that let you play cards without paying its

mana cost are, by and large, very very powerful. In Magic, mana cost is a built-in constraint, a check on power, and if you

can bypass that constraint, broken shenanigans often ensue. The Dragonstorm deck could play its eponymous spell with

Spinerock Knoll for a whopping eight mana discount!

#2: You may play the removed card when you normally wouldn’t be able to (with one exception). So long as you fulfill the

Hideaway land’s mission, you can activate the land’s ability and play that card. You could play an Overrun after blockers

are declared, or a Tidings during someone’s end step. Think about what power you have, once you’ve got the conditions met,

your opponent has got to be worried that anything could spring out of the Hideaway.

#3: It’s slow-roll card advantage. It’s like an advance Impulse that doesn’t cost you a card. If your deck can regularly

set up the conditions on the Hideaway land, they can offer card advantage that some decks are sorely lacking.

So what are the drawbacks?

#1: Loss of tempo. A land coming into play tapped can be anything from a nuisance to a death sentence, depending on the

game state, so you obviously have to think long and hard as to whether your deck can be helped or hindered by adding those

sorts of lands. And there’s some competition! Just in Green, Treetop Village and Llanowar Reborn are proven high-quality

cards that present strong arguments for the same deck space. Now that I think about it, it’s interesting-slash-annoying that

Wizards has seemed to be using this drawback on lands quite a bit of late.

#2: Difficult to meet the conditions. What if you never meet the required conditions to access the card? While it would

suck to remove a good card from the game and never get to use it, you really aren’t losing anything other than some tempo

since for all practical purposes the card could just as easily be at the bottom of your deck and you never drew into it

(outside of tutoring and such).

#3: Vulnerability to Riftsweeper and Pull from Eternity. Actually… this isn’t true – these cards can only target cards that

have been removed from the game face-up, and Hideaway lands specifically say face-down! Perhaps when you crush your

opponent with a well-timed Hideaway activation, your opponent may board these in by mistake, thinking they’d work against

you.

On balance, I think that these cards are definitely not “auto-includes” for most decks, but they offer a significant source

of power if your deck is already configured to meet the conditions. Chapin and crew have already shown us the power of

Spinerock Knoll, let’s take a look at the others, shall we?

Mosswort Adventure: Where’s the beef?

Mosswort Bridge
Land
Hideaway (This land comes into play tapped. When it does, look at the top four cards of your library, remove one from the

game face down, then put the rest on the bottom of your library.) T: Add G to your mana pool. G, T: You may play the removed

card without paying its mana cost if creatures you control have total power 10 or greater.

How difficult is the “adventure?” Ten power worth of creatures sounds like a lot, and you’d imagine that, if you’ve already

got ten-plus power worth of creatures in play, you’re already winning the game so why bother with Hideaway shenanigans?

Well, ten points of power doesn’t necessarily equate to ten points attacking; you could have a creature standoff on the

ground, or your opponent could be dropping a Shriekmaw on your Tarmogoyf before you get to attack. But think about Standard

of late – creatures have gotten really, really good. It wouldn’t be unreasonable to have a Spectral Force and a

Treetop Village in play, would it? That’s eleven power, with only one creature fully exposed to most creature removal.

There are also flash creatures that can mess up your opponent’s math, turning on your Mosswort Bridge unexpectedly. Say it’s

late game, your opponent has swept the board, and he tries to cast something on his turn. You cast Mystic Snake, then with

your remaining six mana you toss out a Cloudthresher end of turn. You’ve now got nine points of power out there. During

your turn, drop a Llanowar Elf or a Loxodon Warhammer and suddenly your Mosswort Bridge is online; you might be able to just

end the game on the spot.

Here’s a sample deck, utilizing the Elf tribe with eight elf-pumping Lords to ramp up to ten power in a hurry, and Garruk can

add to the equation through two of his abilities. How nasty a surprise would it be to have an Overrun under the Bridge with

ten-power worth of elves attacking, and your opponent declares a couple chump blockers? “Before damage is dealt…” BOOM!

What’s nice about pairing Elves with comes-into-play tapped lands is that often you won’t really be losing tempo because you

will already be ahead on mana production with your one-drop elves. Garruk even allows you to make use of a Mosswort the turn

you play it with his untap ability.

Elfwort Stomp

Bennie Smith

Test deck on 12-23-2007

Standard

Creatures (29)

Planeswalkers (4)

4 Garruk Wildspeaker

Lands (23)

Spells (4)

4 Overrun

Howltooth Adventure: Hellbent Fury!

Howltooth Hollow
Land
Hideaway (This land comes into play tapped. When it does, look at the top four cards of your library, remove one from the

game face down, then put the rest on the bottom of your library.) T: Add B to your mana pool. B, T: You may play the removed

card without paying its mana cost if each player has no cards in hand.

How difficult is the “adventure?” This adventure definitely seems a little late to the Standard party, feeling like a

natural fit for Hellbent strategies that rotated out with Ravnica block, as well as Mindslicer that rotated out with 9th

edition. Still, think about current decks like Goyf Rack – say you’ve managed to destroy or counter The Rack, what’s your

strategy for nullifying someone’s hand destruction strategy? You pretty much play out your hand and hope your opponent draws

useless hand destruction spells while you play yours out. Howltooth Hollow can pretty well be the hard place to pair up with

your discard rock; do they empty their hand so that, when your hand is empty you get a free spell from your Hideaway land?

Here’s one based on Randy Smith’s 1st place Champs deck from Prince Edward Island, Canada. I pulled the Damnations and

Smallpox and replaced with Shriekmaws and a copy each of Liliana Vess and Tombstalker, since these seemed much better cards

to Hideaway.

Howlin’ Goyf Rack

Bennie Smith

Test deck on 12-23-2007

Standard

Creatures (17)

Planeswalkers (1)

1 Liliana Vess

Lands (23)

Spells (19)

It occurs to me that Liliana works nicely with Hideaway, letting your tutor a broken card up, then you drop your land and

Hideaway the card, though her neo-Legendary status makes the Howltooth Hollow hellbent requirement a bit sticky so you’d

probably want to run some Gathan Raiders, or perhaps use a different Hideaway land with her.

Shelldock Adventure: Empty Libraries

Shelldock Isle
Land
Hideaway (This land comes into play tapped. When it does, look at the top four cards of your library, remove one from the

game face down, then put the rest on the bottom of your library.) T: Add U to your mana pool. U, T: You may play the removed

card without paying its mana cost if a library has twenty or fewer cards in it.

How difficult is the “adventure?” I’m not much of a Blue mage, but in my many, many epic battles against Blue decks I’ve

seen them burn through a ton of cards in their library before gaining complete control of the game. Outside of dedicated

milling strategies or self-milling Dredge decks, I could see Shelldock Isle being a vital tool in beating a control-on-

control mirror match. How nice would it be to pick on your opponent with an end of turn Guile from under a Hideaway land?

Or when they have a spell on the stack and you’ve got a counterspell ready? Or toss out a Cryptic Command for effectively

two mana? If I’m not mistaken you could even play an Ancestral Vision from under the Hideway land.

Here’s Guillaume Wafo-tapa’s Top 8 deck from GP Krakow, replacing 2 Snow-Covered Islands with Shelldock Isles. Those of you

who are more familiar with the deck, do you think that would help or hinder the deck?

Wafo-tapa Guile with Shelldock

Bennie Smith

Test deck on 12-23-2007

Standard

Creatures (8)

Lands (25)

Spells (27)

Windbrisk Adventure: Into the Red Zone

Windbrisk Heights
Land
Hideaway (This land comes into play tapped. When it does, look at the top four cards of your library, remove one from the

game face down, then put the rest on the bottom of your library.) T: Add W to your mana pool. W, T: You may play the removed

card without paying its mana cost if you attacked with three or more creatures this turn.

How difficult is the “adventure?” Not too hard, really – many decks win on the back of charging through the Red Zone, the

more creatures the better. This being White you naturally think of White Weenie, or more specifically Kithkin, and they are

certainly pre-disposed toward swarm attacking. As Sean brought up in his article though, you’re not always going to want to

be attacking with three (or more) creatures, especially if your opponent has a problematic blocker. That’s why you’re going

to want to pair this land with creature removal (to remove the problematic blocker prior to defenders being declared), or

something to save your blocked creature or pump all of them up (Overrun, Fortify, or Surge of Thoughtweft, for instance).

There’s also the dual problems of, one, you’re not going to want to be losing tempo dropping Windbrisk Heights tapped when

you’re trying to assemble a weenie swarm and two, you don’t necessarily want yet another reason to overextend into mass

removal that grows on trees currently. I have two answers to that – first, this sort of deck is one that can really use the

card advantage benefit offered here. Second, there’s a card that helps immensely with the overextending problem – Militia’s

Pride. When looking at decks to add Windbrisk Heights to, I specifically looked for this dynamite enchantment. Here’s one

based on Sean Inoue’s 1st place deck from New Mexico Champs:

HideaWeenie

Bennie Smith

Test deck on 12-23-2007

Standard

Creatures (24)

Lands (22)

Spells (14)

One sad thing about this Hideaway land is that you’re always going to be restricted to playing spells during your own turn

since you’ll never be able to attack during your opponent’s turn.

So, what do you think of the Hideaway lands? I’m hoping that perhaps I’ve convinced some of you that some of them are worth

another look outside of the Gassy Knoll, giving you some food for thought over the Holidays. Enjoy your Christmas

celebration; I’ll see you the day after… here’s hoping Santa drops off some booster packs of Lorwyn in your — and my —

stockings!

Take care,

Bennie

starcitygeezer AT gmail DOT com