Card/Deck GREEN: Land Attack / Lands Matter

[NimbusToad]

Hi Folks

I am going back and redesigning the old cube that me and a few buds have been drafting from for years (~300 card budget cube with choices heavily influenced by availability) and have been putting some thoughts into how to give Green a unique flavour. I have been mulling over the possibility of pushing a Lands Attack! theme in green, as well as a lands matter theme across a few colours.

Does anybody have any tips for making this sort of theme come together? I am building a 360 card cube, rare and fairly aggressively focused, but with a low/mid power level. I am planning on running quite a few 2-ofs.

For the Lands Attack! theme, this is what I am thinking about running at the moment





To tie into this, I am thinking of pushing loam control / lands matter with this package








Has anyone added this kind of package to their green section? How has it performed? How do you make it work (I Basically I want to beat down with land creatures, recur lands, and generally just do broken land-related things!



I am having a hard time with card tags today. I'll be back a little later on to troubleshoot.

 

[sigh]

Hello and welcome! I have a near and dear spot in my heart for lands-matter based in green. So much so I made a thread about it and dove into 6 pages of brainstorming and designing (and a little drama) . The basic concept is a deck that sets up and wins with a value engine/repeated incremental advantage, often based around utilizing lands as a hand resource.

http://riptidelab.com/forum/threads/start-your-engines-a-temur-card-advantage-deck.1276/

I love this theme, and wove it into developing a green identity in control/grindiness. It's still a theme I continually work to improve in my environment (and I do think it would work better if I opened my mind to breaking singleton lol). Feel free to take a look!

The aggressive side of the theme also benefits from landfall, I think.

Not certain of your environment power level, but fastbond, even one, seems way good. Exploration is probably more what I'd be looking to. Constant Mists is a little lame too, imho.

 

[Onderzeeboot]

I am having a hard time with card tags today. I'll be back a little later on to troubleshoot.

Try "[ c ]cardname[ / c ]" without the spaces (and without the quotes).

Also, quoting your post is hard, you've got font size and font type tags on every line o_O

 

[Jason Waddell]

I fixed up this post a bit. Use the eraser in the top-left to remove all formatting. Copy into notepad also if needed, then copy back. Some things were hyperlinked for some reason. Then wrap it all in a 'ci' tag and it works.

 

[japahn]

I had a lands theme in RG, in the direction of graveyard (Life from the Loam) in a module along with a graveyard theme. The lands deck was super swingy - sometimes it would do nothing, sometimes it would be absurd. I still want to try it out again. It was something like:

 

[Chris Taylor]

Constant Mists is a card I reserve only for the most miserable of EDH games

 

[Grillo_Parlante]

I actually like this best as a R/W control deck with R/G as the secondary combination (or RGW):




Than for green




Some sample lists

R/G Pure Lands Control from CubeTutor.com

Rwg lands control from CubeTutor.com

seismic tax from CubeTutor.com

disclaimer: non-traditional list, and I've been too lazy for IRL testing

 

[sigh]

Tbh, white seems better as a second color only for the last two cards: very good generic control pieces. The RG version has to lean on red more for those tools, which lowers the ceiling a little, but I think it plays the to the land theme a lot more solidly. The white land searchers are powerful, but are either too powerful, and/or rely on being in a contrary gamestate, control without mana superiority. Green has much more consistent land advantage tools that provide less bursty effects but have other upsides. Cards like:

Or straight up combo-level stuff like:

That and dorks gives green a big edge in the mana superiority game, imo. Also they are all cards commonly run to work with other themes. Tithe.... eh.

But in terms of generic goodness, it is probably true white will almost always be the better choice. A naya deck is probably ideal for power consistency. like grillo said:


(white provides some really cool splash cards, I will admit)

 

[japahn]

Yeah, don't run Constant Mists, that wasn't a suggestion. It's miserable.

Don't forget:


White does sounds like a decent color for this deck.

I'm in the all-color vibe for themes lately, so if you were at a lower power level there are other decent land animation spells:


Awaken would tie well with this theme, especially Halimar Tidecaller:


Other random cards I thought of:

 

[NimbusToad]

Lots of useful tips rolling in. I guess I have a few things to think about.

First off, I guess there are some power level/degeneracy issues. Constant Mists and the double Fastbond might be a bit over the top. 2 x Exploration probably is more headed in the right direction. Exploration/Fastbond will, I hope, enable UG control/tempo decks running:



I am also hoping it will combo with amulet of vigor and the bounce lands (I will be running a mixture of Karoos and fetches) to create a strong non-mana dork green ramping package.

In terms of the Life of the loam package, I am sort of struggling to see where exactly it fits. I am hoping to have a graveyard focused format (recursion in black, looting in blue and red, lands recursion in green), so there will be enough ways to pitch it into the yard. I suppose the issue is just: how often is this card simply dead in hand. The second issue sort of becomes: when it isn't dead in hand, is it just broken? As it is, it plays nicely with Stax-style decks, fuels discard engines, brings back fetches, and lets you take late games with retrace cards. I suppose I will just try to build in enough pay-off cards that work in other decks to make Loam a fairly high powered pick that doesn't need to be built around super aggressively.

Speaking of aggro!



I am hoping to establish Sylvan Advocate as the sort of "land lord" (as well as just being a super solid midrange creature that can eat aggro dorks and take the late game). I suppose this theme hasn't been exploited too much at a high power level, so my choice of cards is pretty shallow. What kind of power level does the cube need to be at to make Genju of the Cedars and Awakener Druid some of the gnarliest beaters at their mana cost? I guess I am trying to size the rest of the creatures in the format around making the Lands Attack deck very scary.

Does anyone play with the Zendikons? They seem fairly weak (except maybe wind zendikon, but that isn't really what Blue wants to be doing).

 

[japahn]

I've played Wind Zendikon and Crusher Zendikon, they are fine at lower power levels. Haven't tried the others though.

 

[Grillo_Parlante]

What you would want to do, for lords, would be to run this setup in G/R/U



Advocate should be the absolute top of your power curve. The card is so generically goodstuff, I'm not sure it actually helps the tribal interactions or hurts them, but needless to say you need people picking the embodiments highly and wanting them.

To give some comparison with my splicer powered golem tribal package:




In a lower powered 360. So you kind of have density and payoff issues. Maybe a package like:




I'm a little worried that its not well enough rooted in the second color though, so either break singleton on embodiment of fury or halimar tidecaller. Than you'll want to make sure that you the appropriate awaken cards localized in whatever the two dominant colors are.

The trickiest part of this though, is making sure the rest of the format is congruent with what you want to do in terms of power level. If advocate is your format's baseline in terms of power (or operating in the lower portions of the power band), no one picks the embodiments, and the entire thing collapses under density pressures, as people just good stuff around it.

It has to be the premier midrange deck, because all of the tribal pieces are top tier, not just advocate.

 

[StormEntity]

It seems like you've got a good bit of advice on most of what you talked about from the above posters, but I'd like to touch more on the Life from the Loam/Raven's Crime/Smokestack type thing, since it's more up my alley and more my area of experience. So here goes: obviously the center of any Loam archetype is your Life from the Loam effect, whatever it is that's bringing the lands back for you. Some others to consider if playing an All-Loam configuration isn't desirable for whatever reason (power level, variety, desirability of play patterns):



The real question when it comes to enabling Loam is what are your drafters going to be doing with it? There are several macro-archetypes that are interested in Loam's effect.

1: Indiscriminate Card-Wanting
These decks are interested in Loam because it gives them three cards turn after turn. These decks are very easy and convenient to enable, and there are probably decks in your cube right now that would want Loam for this reason. These types of decks seek to trade resources one-for-one, over and over, as many times as possible in a game, and Loam allows them to have their one be a useless land. The existence of this kind of deck and its extreme non-parasitic nature means that Loam really can't be that bad to include in your cube--it will find a home in some decks, and often can enable new and interesting archetypes. All these decks really need is a way to turn the lands from Loam into cards. There's lots of ways to make this happen:



You haven't provided much in the way of other details about your list, but I'm certain you have some sort of controlling archetypes that can be fueled by the Loam engine. If you find yourself particularly enamored with this kind of Loam deck, you might wish to also consider Squee, Goblin Nabob, as he also does a lovely job enabling this kind of play pattern.

2: Land Cards Matter

This is somewhat similar to the above archetype, but very different in terms of cube construction. We've crossed over now into the realm of purposeful cards that support Loam and other similar recursive land strategies. These decks plan specifically on putting lots of land cards in their hand and leveraging that advantage with specific tailor-made cards that key off having lands. As a result this macro-archetype tends toward greater synergy and parasitism. The convenient thing about this is it's pretty strongly hybridizable with the above All Cards Matter deck type, so you can use these cards as a slight pull of your one-for-one decks toward the lands theme or to define another, often blurrily separated archetype. These cards can be recursive engine cards or powerful one-time effects, but in all cases they like to combine with Loam, Land Tax, and other cards that load up your hand with lands. (Sprouting Vines is a favorite in this role, by the way). Some examples of cards that might help to define this as an archetype:



3: Putting Lands in Play Matters

Something of a subset of those decks that want to have lands in their hand, this type of deck is looking to put a lot of lands into play for whatever reason. Maybe it gets landfall triggers, maybe it has uses for a large amount of mana, maybe it has cards that care about the number of lands in play. In any case it intends to put the lands Loam returns and put them in play. Often it's just fine to be doing this once per turn, but this is really where the extra-lands effects shine. Exploration, Summer Bloom, and their ilk can turn a Loam into a pile of additional lands extremely quickly, while you can at low cube-inclusion costs include all sorts of payoffs for playing lands that allow you to generate value above and beyond the mana the lands produce. Again, some examples:



This list is overwhelmingly green, but that's just a color pie thing. If you want to branch it into more colors, just drop your power level a bit and integrate it with the theme Grillo suggested: all of the Embodiments are, in addition to lords for the land creature archetype, excellent landfall payoffs. I'd like to emphasize that this post is, rather than a different vision for the lands archetype than the land creature tribal plan, a natural dovetail with the ideas brainstormed earlier in the thread.


4: Specific Lands Matter

This deck wants to use Loam to get back particular lands in order to use their effects over and over again, or it wants to leverage the graveyard to use Loam as a powerful recursive tutor. In that respect Loam combos especially well here with another interesting class of tutors: Gifts Ungiven and Intuition, both of which can get the lands you're interested in returning with Loam or just dump it in the graveyard to get other Loam value engines running smoothly. In any case, the specific lands matter plan has several manifestations, from slow and grindy engines to rapid combo kills. Here's some fun (and less than fun) examples of lands to recur and interactions encompassed here:




Any or all of these archetypes could be present in a cube that seeks to utilize Loam and other recursive land engines. The important thing is to decide how to allocate space to them and how to integrate them together to produce interesting hybridized land archetypes. One interesting consideration, once you set down this path of considering all the ways Loam interacts, is that different Loam-like effects have different strengths and weaknesses and create an interesting knob on the land strategies in your format. Having trouble with too many lands-in-hand decks? Crucible of Worlds only works one way with them, while Loam forms a full engine. Similarly Splendid Reclamation works better for one-time, compressed interactions such as in a combo deck than for the grindy decks that suit Loam and Crucible. There's lots to think about, because Loam and associated archetypes are extremely deep and rich space. Hope you enjoy eking value out of your lands in every cube session!