Ah, land destruction; everybody's favorite method of defeating their respective opponents. The appearance of a land-destruction deck brings smiles to everyone's face, every time.

Okay; a popular method seen more often than not amongst players, and endured with a forced grin on the odd occasions it is encountered?

One person per group playing their LD deck is still one LD deck too many?

...Not even then, huh?

All right, let's face it - land destruction decks can be a downright pain to deal with. Ever since I wrote about discovering how effective this type of deck could be in duels or our emperor format, two other people have begun to use LD. One of the other people actually had this type of deck before I did, but he didn't use it all that often, due to how poorly LD decks do in multiplayer formats.

Since the article, I have been fortunate to not encounter one of these decks in one of our group games. I did get destroyed in a duel, however, with a rapidity that put my own deck to shame. The Chaos Mage uses a deck that has both red and black in it, which of course means that he has Sinkholes, which also means that I got precisely nowhere. The reason the game took as long as it did was because it took a while to get a creature out to whittle me down.

In the realm of land destruction, I cannot think of another writer who has dedicated as much article space to land destruction as Peter Jahn. On multiple occasions, he has written about possible methods for destroying single lands - or everybody's lands. What makes his work unique is that he goes through the trouble of creating decks that will destroy lands... But not his own. The contemptuously familiar combination of Zuran Orb/Balance/Land Tax is not for him, oh, no.

Peter takes an entire article to describe three ways of crucifying your opponents via screwing with their lands. One of the more interesting things about this article, should you take the time to read it, is that it occurs very early in Peter's writing at StarCityGames - a sign of the vile things that he would eventually come up with to do to the players in his group, no doubt.

The three ways that Peter talks about causing people problems through land are as follows: One, by turning his lands into creatures and then killing his opponents with them. Two, by turning all lands into creatures and then killing them by the use of sweeping direct damage spells (think Pyroclasm). Three, by getting the other players to discard the lands that they have in their hands before they can play them.

The methods described above appear in the order in which they would have the most success, from best to worst. In multiplayer games, it is difficult to deal with the various armies. When somebody makes creatures out of their lands unexpectedly, it spells doom for at least one person... But making everybody's lands into creatures and then killing them is more original than just nuking them outright. It also requires significantly more finesse and intricacy in the deck construction.

The third option, while easier than the second option, really doesn't seem as in flavor as the other two. Discard is a strategy that I have wanted to try out myself for some time now, but I do not look at it in terms of depriving the other players of land. While I do care about their land, and would like to limit what they get, I would rather have them incapable of having anything to do with the land.

The difficulty, which Peter points out, is that the decks are fragile. While the decks that he presents are original and quirky, they have an extremely difficult time surviving once the other players realize what the deck does.

Now fast-forward about two years. The available methods of destroying other people's property have increased both in number and style, and Peter takes full advantage of that. Almost offhandedly, he presents an article that deals with a viable multiplayer land destruction deck.

Here, very quickly, are the basics of the deck:

4 Birds of Paradise
4 Yavimaya Elder
4 Wall of Roots
3 Moss Diamond
4 Fire Diamond
1 Sol Ring
4 Wooded Foothills
4 Taiga
4 Shivan Oasis
4 Karplusan Forest
And an unknown number of Starstorms, Creeping Molds, and Patterns of Rebirth

Take my word for it that he has a perfectly acceptable number of the right types of lands to make the deck work.

Peter does a good job of speeding the deck up so that he has all the mana that he needs rather early in the game. The small green creatures that he uses in the early game are innocuous enough so that people are not going to look in his direction until it is too late. The appearances of the various Diamonds in the deck are an unfortunate giveaway as to what the deck is to eventually accomplish, but are ultimately necessary.

He has mentioned in other articles of his that several of the smaller creatures that he has in this deck are staples. While I understand the use of the Elders and the Walls, I was wondering why he uses the Birds as opposed to Quirion Elves. He only has two colors that he has to worry about - and once people figure out which deck he is playing, I wouldn't think that announcing that red is the other color is going to ruin surprises. However, the Birds do fly, which means that if they do have to sacrifice themselves blocking something, they can block a wider range of creatures than mere groundpounders. The Elves have the advantage of being able to attack for damage if the opportunity arises, however, without the necessity of some boost from an enchantment.

The Wildfires and Tectonic Breaks are intrinsic to the whole deck, and the Breaks themselves are an excellent an addition as you can get. You even get the advantage of staying within color, as opposed to having to do something drastic like add white to the mix. (Actually, until reading the article, I didn't even know that Tectonic Break existed.)

But I completely dispute the addition of Epicenter. While threshold can be achieved with greater ease, it is still too situational for my liking. I would have replaced it with something that takes care of artifacts. That way you are still staying within color, and have the potential to continue to shut down someone else who might have successfully cast an artifact mana source before you destroy all of the lands.

While I do not question Peter's choice of creatures being used as the kill cards, if I had a deck such as this, I personally would try to find the room to fit in two more Covetous Dragons. I say this for two reasons: I had a member of my group that played a deck of similar design some time ago. He used straight red - with mana producing artifacts, of course, for the Covetous Dragons.

There were some immediate problems with the deck, however: First of all, trying to kill an entire group of people with one dragon takes a long time, and usually it takes long enough that people are able to recoup their losses, and universally concentrate all of their firepower at the land-destroying heretic. Secondly, we usually play with enough spot removal that the dragon's expiration date was soon reached. The third and final problem - although this had nothing to do with the player's deck at the time - was that Tectonic Break and Terravore didn't exist. Trying to play a multiplayer land destruction deck in one color with only one card that can destroy everybody's land is difficult, to put it mildly.

It occurred to me that in an ideal situation, Peter would want to cast Wildfire as soon as he has everything in place, and then follow it up when necessary with the Tectonic Breaks. The reasoning here is that while Wildfire is effective, it removes his own creatures as well. If he cast the Wildfire first and then manages to cast more creatures with his alternative sources of mana, then he has both more mana and potential attacking power. Tectonic Break will allow him to choose when he allocates the mana to shut everybody down again, without having to resort to the more complete destruction that Wildfire produces.

While the Pattern of Rebirths do allow for some fun with the deck, one would presume that the Creeping Molds have been replaced with Naturalizes. Other than not being able to destroy lands, Naturalize is a cheaper version of Creeping Mold - and given what the deck is intended to do, the cheaper spell would offset the spot land destruction ability. I do not know why Peter has Starstorms as his general removal of choice, as he unfortunately does not go into that.

On a similar topic, in my last article I wrote that I was considering the necessity of including Strip Mines on a more frequent basis in my decks. This hypothesis was supported recently during one of our sessions. One of my group has an extremely efficient black deck that maximizes the use of Gravepacts, Volrath's Strongholds, Sengir Autocrats, and Phyrexian Plaguelords. During his last game we discovered that it was almost impossible to accomplish anything when we were losing everything that we put out on the table. And every time that we tried to get rid of the creatures that he had out, he just brought them right back with the Stronghold. Peter lists the circumstances when land should be destroyed, and the Stronghold was on his list of lands that deserve destruction.

What makes the games more interesting for us is that none of the lands are restricted either. We do not go to the extent of ignoring the one-legend-at-a-time rule, as that would be outright breaking the rules, not to mention would result in combinations that would be too much for anyone to handle.

That about covers it for this time around. Next time, I will be talking about a problem that I have discovered occurring more and more often in our games that has resulted in our games since we removed all of the banned and restricted lists. I will also be talking about an experiment that I have been performing lately, in the hopes of finding out whether Anthony Alongi actually knows what he is talking about.

Until next time, take care.