It’s still the case that most decks in Legacy are creature-based strategies. That’s why Lands is so freaking good. And that’s why The Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale is one of the best cards in Legacy.
Last week I observed how Lands was the deck catapulted the greatest proportion of its players of any archetype into Day 2 of Grand Prix: Madrid, into the Top 64 at Grand Prix: Madrid, and tied for putting the greatest proportion into the Top 32. Lands is one of the top performers in the format, alongside decks like Reanimator, ANT, and Zoo. This week I’ll take an in-depth look at the Lands deck.
I took this to a local tournament, placing second:
Lands (37)
Spells (23)
If you are just looking over the list, it may seem confusing or strange. That’s because it is. It’s one of the most unusual archetypes in Legacy, and a very unique strategy. The Lands deck advances its strategy in three phases.
Step 1: Stabilize and Clog the Board
The Land deck primarily works because of the interaction of Tabernacle, Wastelands, and Maze of Ith. The Tabernacle puts a sharp limit on the number of creatures your opponent can keep in play. Wasteland keeps that number small. Then, Maze of Ith keeps whatever creatures remain on board at bay. Mishra’s Factory also helps out in that regard, blocking — and killing — anything else that may be sent in the red zone.
The Land pilot’s first objective is to clog the board, making it impossible or difficult for the opponent to attack. What’s impressive is how quickly this can be accomplished thanks to cards like Exploration and Manabond to dump lands onto the board. Tolaria West finds Mazes and the Tabernacle. And Life from the Loam (or Intuition for Life From the Loam) will help you quickly find more answers.
The process of clogging up the board and tying up mana is actually a mutually reinforcing process. To a certain extent, it’s like a Chinese finger trap: the harder your opponent tries to break out of the lock, the more locked down they will become. The more creatures they play, the more mana they will tie up in keeping those creatures around, preventing them from playing other spells. That’s what Tabernacle does.
Rishadan Port helps. With Wasteland, Port prevents the opponent from playing spells in their main phase, as the Lands pilot will activate Port to tap down their mana in the opponent’s upkeep. With just a few creatures in play, a Tabernacle and a Port or two can tie up an opponent’s entire manabase.
At this point the opponent will keep on believing that they can eventually break the lock. But like any heartbreaker, you’ll stamp their hope to dust. With each additional mana, you’ll play another Port. And with each additional creature, you’ll drop another Maze.
Ghost Quarter can also help trim your opponent’s manabase, particularly if they only run a few basics.
And if things get out of control, you’ll fall to Plan B. You’ll use Engineered Explosives (recurring it with Academy Ruins) to wipe out their creatures, play Ensnaring Bridge to prevent them from attacking, or just play Glacial Chasm to prevent all damage, recurring it and replaying it every turn with Life From the Loam.
This is what we mean by clogging up the board and stabilizing.
Step 2: Generate Card Advantage With Loam
Once you’ve reached equilibrium, and your Mazes and Tabernacles are keeping your opponent’s creatures at bay, and your Ports, Wastelands, and Tabernacle are keeping their mana pretty well tied up, you can begin to shift into the second phase of the game: generating card advantage with Life from the Loam.
At this point, your goal is simple: Dredge as much as you can as quickly as possible. You will do this using your draw step to dredge, but you’ll also cycle Tranquil Thicket to dredge Loam. For five mana you can Loam twice a turn with Tranquil Thicket. You’ll then use Exploration or Manabond to translate your dredges into on-board advantage, by zone shifting the Dredged lands from the graveyard to the battlefield. You can really go bonkers with a Cephalid Coliseum, and 2-3 Loams, because you can then dredge 9+ cards a turn.
This step is defined by the interaction of Exploration/Manabond and Life From the Loam. Although Exploration is good here, the card you really want is Manabond to generate card advantage as quickly as possible.
If you don’t have Manabond, it may be worth using Cephalid Coliseum to begin Ancestral Recalling yourself in search of it (or more Exploration). You can probably find one within a few activations, and then just explode onto the table.
Step 3: Clear the Table and Win
After stabilizing and zone shifting most of your library to your graveyard and then to the battlefield, you are ready to win. Use Engineered Explosives to clear away blockers or any other obstacle, and begin attacking with 3-4 Mishra’s Factories for the win.
Some Lands lists have other manlands, such as Gargoyle Castle. Other Lands lists have backup win conditions, like Barbarian Ring recursion, or Cephalid Coliseum to deck your opponent. Chris Woltereck used Mindslaver as a finisher to take total control. In any case, the Lands deck can always just win by decking. Academy Ruins will ensure that you never draw your entire deck, as you can infinitely recur Engineered Explosives or a Mox Diamond. If your opponent is stupid enough to let you deck them, you’ll likely eat up most of the round time winning the first game, preventing them from really having a shot at winning the match.
Breaking Down Step 1
Step 1 is the critical step, but with any given opening hand, you can’t just immediately clog the board. Outside of a really strong hand with Manabond, there is some work required to ‘clog’ the board. That’s why Step 1 is really five concurrent processes, only two of which I made explicit: 1) mana denial (Port, Wasteland, etc), 2) defensive tactics (Maze, Tabernacle, Factory, etc), 3) search/tutoring (Intuition, Tolaria West, etc), 4) acceleration (Mox Diamond, Exploration, etc), and 5) some amount of Loaming. These processes support and feed each other, and sometimes do the opposite. Let me break them all down, and explain using examples.
The mana denial (1) element is also a defensive tactic (2). When you Port, Wasteland, or tie up your opponent’s mana with Tabernacle, they are less able to play more threats. Playing defensive tactics (2) require tutoring (3). You’ll often tutor up — with Intuition or Tolaria West — Tabernacle and Maze of Ith to help solidify your defensive position. Sometimes, you’ll tutor up Glacial Chasm. Your acceleration (4) helps you tutor (3) more quickly to set up your defense (2). It also helps you Loam (5) sooner.
The trick — and the real challenge with this deck — is when these processes don’t support each other.
Challenge 1: Defense or Development
As a Vintage player, most Legacy decks strike me as relatively simple. It’s hilarious that people complain about how ‘difficult’ ANT or Legacy Storm Combo decks are to play. Vintage Storm combo, like The Perfect Storm, is many orders of magnitude more complex and challenging to pilot (and that’s not hyperbole), and has to be piloted against much greater resistance. There are no auto-win matchups in Vintage.
Lands has actually presented an archetype with a much higher learning curve than the average Legacy archetype. In fact, it may have one of the highest learning curves in terms of mastery level play. This is true for a number of reasons. There is no analog to Lands in Vintage (perhaps the closest comparison is Stax, and it’s still a far cry). It’s a virtually singular and incredibly unique archetype, with unusual tactics and strategic options.
One of the key challenges with the deck is whether to develop or build defense.
Consider this scenario:
It’s your third turn. Your opponent played turn 2 Tarmogoyf, which sent you to 17, and is about to send you to 14. Your opponent also just played Rhox War Monk with Noble Hierarch, despite the fact that you Ported one of their lands last turn.
Your board is Rishadan Port and Tropical Island. They Forced your turn 1 Exploration. But your hand is full of lands. You can play a Maze of Ith and staunch the bleeding, or you can wait a turn to play Maze by playing a mana producing land and play Intuition or transmute Tolaria West for something helpful. Which do you do?
This basic scenario, and the hundreds of variations on it, is one of the most fundamental issues with this deck.
If you don’t have Life From the Loam in hand, then the Intuition will allow you to begin dredging. The Goyf and the Rhox War Monk will send you to 11 life, and then even after you play Maze, you’ll be at least at 8 life, and possibly lower if they play another creature or two (such as Goyf + Pridemage). If you do have Life From the Loam, then the Intuition can just find a bunch of defensive cards, but you won’t be able to use them all immediately.
Consider a similar scenario:
You are playing against Merfolk. They played turn 1 Aether Vial. You have turn 1 Exploration Forced. They play turn 2 Lord of Atlantis and then turn 3 Merrow Reejerey. If you play Maze of Ith on turn 3, to slow the attack, which is the intuitive play, you will actually slow down your development. You need to play out several turns ahead, so that you can tutor for defensive answers and then begin playing them in succession. Reejerey will allow your opponent to tap down Mazes, and there is always the chance that they will draw a well-timed Wasteland. So reducing damage is a priority, but you need to be smart about it, and think ahead.
Do you Wasteland their Mutavault or do you use your Wasteland to play Intuition, or even Life From the Loam? Do you Port their lands or do you use that mana to play Intuition? This is one of the most fundamental decisions to be made with the deck. It’s a highly context-sensitive decision. But it’s one that will require you to slow down, think carefully, and plan ahead. Playing as defensively as possible will not necessarily minimize your damage in the long-run. This is one of the key challenges for the Lands pilot. Sucking up short term damage is often the correct play, if it allows you to overwhelm them in subsequent turns.
Challenge 2: Tutor Targets
Whether you play Gamble, Intuition, Tolaria West, or some combination thereof, tutoring decisions is the second major skill challenge for the Lands pilot. Intuition piles with this deck are as complicated as Vintage Gifts Ungiven piles: ridiculous. You have an incredible array of options. Picking the optimal three cards is incredibly challenging.
As a general rule, if you don’t have Life from the Loam, you will almost always want to choose Loam as one of the three cards. But selecting the other two cards becomes context and matchup dependent. Let me discuss some packages.
The Tolaria West Package
Life from the Loam
Tolaria West
Tropical Island
Is a package that will allow you to tutor up pretty much anything in your deck. With enough time and with five mana, you can recur Tolaria West every turn and begin filling the table with answers, such as successive Mazes, Tabernacle, and Academy Ruins + Engineered Explosives (which Tolaria West can also find).
It’s also a very slow package, and not one that you’ll likely want to tutor up in a game with any kind of pressure.
The “Under-Duress” Package:
Life From the Loam
Maze of Ith
Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale
This is the package you get if you are under a lot of pressure. You don’t have time to sit around and twiddle your thumbs. You need answers ASAP. And you can’t risk Ensnaring Bridge not resolving.
The Counterbalance Package
If you are fighting Counterbalance, you’ll likely want to assemble the answer immediately:
Life From the Loam
Academy Ruins
Engineered Explosives
Explosives will allow you to pay any amount to destroy Counterbalance (since you can pump colorless mana into it).
You Already Have Loam in Hand/Active Package:
Tranquil Thicket
Wasteland / Maze of Ith / Tabernacle
Tolaria West / Cephalid Coliseum
If you already have Loam in hand, then you are basically just tutoring up cards that you’ll want to be able to use in the near future. The Coliseum will allow you to find Exploration or Manabond soon. Tranquil Thicket is helpful not simply because it will allow you to Dredge more than one time per turn, but because it also protects your Loam, by putting it to your hand in response to anything that might try to stop it, like Tormod’s Crypt.
Challenge 3: Land Order
Almost every turn you will play a land, and on some turns you will play more. That means, from the first turn on, you will have an option as to which land to play, and any time there is an option, there is opportunity for error.
Consider a hand like this:
Mox Diamond
The Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale
Life From the Loam
Wooded Foothills
Exploration
Rishadan Port
Mishra’s Factory
This is a seemingly simple hand. It’s actually enormously complex. There are numerous lines of play here, and only one produces maximum board and card advantage.
There are four options as to which land to discard to Mox Diamond and four options as to which land to play on turn 1. There are also three different turn 1 lines of play: 1) Life From the Loam (which requires you to play Mox Diamond), 2) Exploration (which doesn’t require you to play Mox Diamond, or 3) Rishadan Port without Exploration (which requires you to play Mox Diamond).
There are strong reasons for each line of play. Playing Exploration on turn 1 will help your development throughout the entire game. Playing Life From the Loam immediately will maximize your dredging, and dig you deeper faster. Porting your opponent will slow them down.
Obviously, whether you are on the play or not will make a tremendous difference. If you are on the draw, then Porting them is a more attractive option, since it will allow you to tie up their mana on their second turn. You can even do this in combination with turn 1 Exploration, for instance.
I imagine that most of you will vote for Exploration, but playing Exploration may actually be riskier than it looks if you are playing against a Blue deck, since they’ll likely counter it. It may just be better to play Mox Diamond, Land, and immediately cast Life From the Loam, which is ineffectual to counter, but allows you to dredge on your next turn and start recurring lands and generating card advantage sooner. If you play Exploration on turn 1, and they counter it, you won’t be able to dredge next turn. That could be a huge mistake. Dredging through your deck as quickly as possible is very important.
Then there is the question of how to implement your plan
On the play, against an unknown opponent, suppose you lead with Mox Diamond and it resolves. Which land do you discard?
Again, there are merits to each play. Playing Factory now means that it can attack next turn and tap to pump itself next turn, if blocking. Playing Port will allow you to Port them. Playing Foothills, however, is in my opinion the strongest play. Why?
If you play Foothills and crack it and discard something else to Mox Diamond, you can actually put the Foothills back into your hand you can then return it to your hand with Life From the Loam and play it again next turn. It’s this subtle, yet real card advantage that can make the difference between winning and losing, between optimal/mastery level play and the novice.
Focus on Bad Matchups
ANT and Reanimator are two of the best decks in the format, according to recent results. They also happen to be weaker matchups for Lands. ANT is virtually unwinnable game 1, and Reanimator poses some real challenges for the Lands pilot. With access to virtually every card in Magic, the Lands pilot is capable of addressing them with various tactics and tricks. Karakas, for example, can bounce Iona to get your Loam engine back online. Bojuka Bog and Tormod’s Crypt can remove creatures from game. Ensnaring Bridge can prevent them from attacking. Ghost Quarter and Tabernacle can eat up their manabase and remove their creatures. And Smokestack is an all purpose answer.
Whatever the matchup may be, it is important to get as much of an edge as possible against your weaker matchups with strong sideboard options.
Until next time…