General Archetype suggestions for a Lands Matter cube?

M

Mudcrabs

This is my first time making a cube, and I like the idea of making every archetype related to Lands. I've made a ton of janky lands decks in EDH, like a Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth secret commander deck with cards like Crusading Knight, legendary lands copying deck with Cadric, Soul Kindler, and land bounce deck with Patron of the Moon. I'd would love to curate a limited environment which uses some of these cards but am having trouble coming up with what to do for some of the archetypes.

Right now I like the idea of Gruul as Land Discard theme utilising cards like Borborygmos Enraged, Golgari as a self mill lands in graveyard matters using [[Spider Spawning]], Boros as land sacrifice and mass land recursion with Second Sunrise and Mana Seism type cards. I also think Boros could house the lands discard theme with a Land Tax type cards being used to fill up hands to be able to discard better. A creature land aggro deck could definitely be fun as well as a land aura untapping deck maybe.

There's definitely some more difficult colour pairs to work with such as Orzhov but I wanna see the idea through. Any advice or suggestions would be much appreciated!!
 
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Erik Twice

Erik Twice

I think lands is a varied archetype, you can focus on quite different things with it:

- Putting lands into play
- Discarding lands for effect
- Getting specific lands into play
- Sacrificing lands
- Playing lands from the graveyard
- Ramping
- Aggro lands
- Midrange
- Etc.

I would start by adding some cards or archetypes that could be fun to support. For example, Orzhov could lean into Stax.
 
Zoss

Zoss

Hey, welcome to the forums! I never realized that Cadric could copy lands, that's a super neat interaction. Could probably do something fun with Flagstones of Trokair.

You can also have a couple of "shard" archetypes, so maybe Esper gets to be manland control. Creeping Tar Pit and Celestial Colonnade are classics. However, I think you'll eventually need to clarify even further what role you want lands to play in the cube--is this intended to showcase all the roles lands can play, do you want all the most powerful strategies to center around land cards, do you only want people to be able to win running lands à la 100 Ornithopters, or soemthing else entirely? You don't need to answer this right now, but I'm looking forward to seeing how this develops!

To that end, do you foresee a role for Landfall in this project? Or would you want to stay away from it? How do you feel about Plated Geopede vs Toggo?

Also, do you have a specific space carved out for double-faced and bounce lands? I think that could be a really enticing hook!

Oh, and as a side note, to get cards to show up as images, you'll want to surround their names with [ CI ] and [ /CI ] (remove the spaces). [ C ] and [ /C ] does the same for Hit the quote button on the bottom right of this comment to see an example.

 
Mown

Mown



Black is kind of iffy. You could embrace stax, but that is probably worse in a cube where everyone likes lands. Maybe just give them more nonbasic lands to draft.

Could support it with some kind of attrition gameplan where players are lower on resources, so mana efficiency becomes less important and the secondary effects of your lands more important.
 
K

Karshtakavaar

You'll probably end up running Life from the Loam because it's a sweet lands card, and that says one thing to me: Cycling lands.
While I would then immediately run Astral Slide, there are other ways to synergize with an abundance of cycling lands. Discard-matters effects are really plentiful now, but there's also the "draw second card" stuff like On the Trail or Zimone and Dina
If you go Cycling matters, as soon as you're running Bicycles or Triomes you may as well run land-cyclers like Furnace-Host Charger so you can chain cycles too, and that opens up its own avenues.

Sunken Citadel and Blossoming Tortoise seem like cool build-arounds/potential combo enablers as well (And they both like Cycling lands too).
I don't think there's any A-B combos with the Tortoise and a land, but there's still like, Time Spiral storage lands, Deserted Temple, Rishadan Port, etc.
 
M

Mudcrabs

Zoss said:
Hey, welcome to the forums! I never realized that Cadric could copy lands, that's a super neat interaction. Could probably do something fun with Flagstones of Trokair.

You can also have a couple of "shard" archetypes, so maybe Esper gets to be manland control. Creeping Tar Pit and Celestial Colonnade are classics. However, I think you'll eventually need to clarify even further what role you want lands to play in the cube--is this intended to showcase all the roles lands can play, do you want all the most powerful strategies to center around land cards, do you only want people to be able to win running lands à la 100 Ornithopters, or soemthing else entirely? You don't need to answer this right now, but I'm looking forward to seeing how this develops!

To that end, do you foresee a role for Landfall in this project? Or would you want to stay away from it? How do you feel about Plated Geopede vs Toggo?

Also, do you have a specific space carved out for double-faced and bounce lands? I think that could be a really enticing hook!

Oh, and as a side note, to get cards to show up as images, you'll want to surround their names with [ CI ] and [ /CI ] (remove the spaces). [ C ] and [ /C ] does the same for Hit the quote button on the bottom right of this comment to see an example.

Click to expand...
Thank you happy to be here! Thought I would include the link to the actual cube so far: https://cubecobra.com/cube/overview/970f2d7b-1608-4595-9a4e-c3aed910f343

My vision for this cube is for all of the strategies to be focused around lands. I'm toying with the idea of making this a desert cube to really incentivise how important they will be. I like that making it a desert cube will stop lands from being an afterthought and be an important part of the drafting experience the whole time.

I want landfall to be sprinkled throughout all colours as a generic payoff, however I'm intentionally leaving out the more powerful green cards so other colours aren't completely outshined.

Definitely like the idea of including as many MDFC lands as possible, works really nicely with all of the land bounce stuff. Have also included quite a few exchange lands/permanents cards which work well with the land bounce as you could swap your land with an opponents then return the land you gave them to its owners hand (you!). Thank you for the card image tip as well!.
 
M

Mudcrabs

L
Karshtakavaar said:
You'll probably end up running Life from the Loam because it's a sweet lands card, and that says one thing to me: Cycling lands.
While I would then immediately run Astral Slide, there are other ways to synergize with an abundance of cycling lands. Discard-matters effects are really plentiful now, but there's also the "draw second card" stuff like On the Trail or Zimone and Dina
If you go Cycling matters, as soon as you're running Bicycles or Triomes you may as well run land-cyclers like Furnace-Host Charger so you can chain cycles too, and that opens up its own avenues.

Sunken Citadel and Blossoming Tortoise seem like cool build-arounds/potential combo enablers as well (And they both like Cycling lands too).
I don't think there's any A-B combos with the Tortoise and a land, but there's still like, Time Spiral storage lands, Deserted Temple, Rishadan Port, etc.
Click to expand...
Love astral slide, would love to get that in there! I think I could definitely include a cycling package, the necrobloom especially would make for a very cool deck where you can cycle your lands then dredge them back to keep the cycling going. These would work great with the lands in gy theme and bounce/blink theme too so i think thats a slam dunk.
 
M

Mudcrabs

LadyMapi said:
Black absolutely loves counting swamps:



Having mono-black control be an archetype feels very lands-y to me.
Click to expand...
I think this could work for sure, Dread Presence and Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth would be key to this. Could also do something similar for mountains Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle and Magus of the Moon or Dryad of Ilysian Grove for both. This could all work cool with the mass land recursion spells in white and green.

 
MilesOfficial

MilesOfficial

Some new and old hotness:



Rydia, Summoner of Mist is great for almost any Cube, but that landfall ability is especially sweet in a lands-focused world.

Sand Scout is a sweet card I desperately wish I could play. I think the second ability would do it alone for me, but the specific mention of deserts is less than ideal.

Trenchpost is a compelling alternative win-con.

Ruination is something again I'm looking into for my main Cube. It's a great card to keep things a bit honest, but I know folks don't love LD. Speaking of...

Land Equilibrium and Mana Vortex were in my Cube as a way to slow down ramp decks in the early years. They're dumb but I love them; I still consider Mana Vortex from time-to-time. I wonder if I still have my copy of Equilibrium.

Hallowed Ground is mostly for the art, but I've always wanted to build a deck around it. There's got to be something cool you can do with it.

Conquer (and its superior but less vibes-y brother Annex) become a lot cooler as we get more things like man-lands and earth bending.
 
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