We’re midway through MDV’s Land Theme Week. Having fun yet?

Land is an amazing thing. It’s the resource that makes the game tick. At Magic’s very inception, one of the foremost rules of the game was “You can not play more than one land per turn.” With this one simple stipulation, Richard Garfield created a world that we all know and enjoy today.

The very concept of lands is one of resource management, which has led some of the greatest minds of the game to come up with theories of the best optimization of lands and mana, both of which are seated at the root of card advantage and other impressive Magic theories. Players have spent the past fourteen years trying to figure out the best configurations of land, the right amounts for their decks, and the best way to optimize their lands so they can work their "magic."

It's a bad pun, I know. You can't win 'em all the time.

Even if you aren’t interested in theory like me, every player can, at some level, understand that land is an integral part of the game. You need lands to play spells. Period.

Lands are a blessing and a curse. There’s nothing more satisfying than finding the fourth land you need to destroy an opponent’s army of creatures with a Wrath of God (or with Damnation, fresh ink smell included!), and there’s nothing more frustrating than drawing your fifth land in a row. Every time you play the game, there is that lurking scenario of too many or too few lands. Lady Luck is a fickle mistress.

Speaking of too few lands… yes, that thing that pretty much everyone hates, looms out there beyond the distance. You know what I’m talking about.

Stone Rain, Avalanche Riders, and Sinkhole ring any bells? They’re out there waiting. Land destruction is a powerful force, a force that every player will probably deal with from time to time. And unless you’re one of the guys that likes to quit a game at the very second the first land destruction spell hits the table, you’re going to have to deal with land destruction for the better part of your Magic career.

Here’s a secret. Land destruction can still be a fun (or at least tolerable) deck to play, and play against, provided one tiny little requirement. If your opponent is losing lands, you should be too.

How can you take advantage of this? Let’s take a look at my latest decklist, and we’ll find out, won’t we?

The deck is a pretty simple one, and it operates around getting land into your graveyard. While I couldn’t use Life from the Loam (too expensive for my tastes) to fuel the engine for this deck, there are a lot of great cards in here. Forgotten Cave and Tranquil Thicket act as card filtering and Terravore pumping for one colored mana apiece, and cards like Kodama’s Reach and Sakura-Tribe Elder thin out your deck even more by pulling land out into play.

The idea is to make Terravore really big with Terramorphic Expanse, cycling lands, and land sacrifices. You use your Magma Veins, Custody Battles, Shocks and Volcanic Hammers to keep your opponent out of the game while you carefully whittle away at his life total with Gruul Guildmage or Sakura-Tribe Elder, and eventually, either play Terravore and Bust to make a gigantic trampling Lhurgoyf, or disrupt their plans with Indrik Stomphowler and finish them off with your 4/4 beast.

A nifty little trick you can pull is using Boom // Bust without actually losing a land. You do this by using Boom targeting a Terramorphic Expanse and your opponent’s land, then after the spell is on the stack, you can tap then sacrifice the Terramorphic Expanse to search for a land. A spell only checks to see if any of its targets are legal when it resolves, so as long as your opponent still controls that land that you targetted when Boom resolves, he’ll be down a land, and you’ll have found a shiny new basic to go along with the lands you’ve already played.

Things to Remember

1) Gruul Guildmage can pump itself, and your other creatures. There’s nothing like being able to push through 4 or even 6 damage with Gruul Guildmage. His 3G ability can really make him useful if your opponent has bigger creatures, because he can use it to trade with a larger creature, or use it to gain an advantage against smaller creatures.

2) Magma Vein can act as a finisher. By this, I mean that you can easily sacrifice one or two lands to Magma Vein at the end of your opponent’s turn, then sacrifice the rest to wipe the entire board clean so you can attack with Terravore for the win. It also serves to keep weenie strategies off the board, but be careful using it to kill only one creature. You're better off trading lands to get an advantage, not go 2 or 3 of your lands for one of their creatures.

3) Don’t be afraid to use your creature removal on your opponent. Those Shocks and Volcanic Hammers can target your opponent you know! If they get down into the single digits, if you have the advantage, you can use up your creature removal in order to make them go down a lot quicker.

Card Suggestions

My first suggestion is Wooded Foothills, a card that’s amazing, yet extremely expensive. Good lands aren’t cheap. This fetchland can find both Mountains and Forests while boosting your land/graveyard count, and bring a land into play untapped, which is huge in this deck. What’s also huge is this card’s price tag. The Boom trick I described earlier in the article works with the Onslaught fetchlands too, so it’s an even better trick with this card in your deck.

Life from the Loam can give you a powerful card advantage engine with cycling lands, so that’s always an option. It’s not extremely expensive, but a playset could run you upwards of $12. If you start running Life from the Loam, check out Cephilid Coliseum. Pro Magic players have been playing with this combo since Pro Tour Honolulu, and it’s been working fabulously since then. There’s no reason you can’t run it either!

Speaking of reusing lands that are in your graveyard, Crucible of Worlds is nice to use with Terramorphic Expanse and Wooded Foothills. It also makes Boom//Bust a lot nicer for you, since you can use it on any land.

Check out creatures like Lithatog, Fault Riders, and Lesser Gargadon. While not stellar creatures in their own right, their ability to send lands to your graveyard can be pretty helpful, and in their own right, they’re like Bust in that they make a Terravore big rather quickly.

Well, that’s all this time around. Thanks for reading, and enjoy the rest of Land Week, brought to you by MDV!

~Death_By_Beebles

Death_By_Beebles is a writer/editor for Magic Deck Vortex, and can often be found tinkering with his latest decks while concurrently studying for his next Organic Chemistry exam. He is the author of Raiding the Dollar Bins and Going Blind series at MDV. You can visit his website at this link.

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Articles Spotlights from 2007:
Lorwyn Theme Week Intro & Schedule of Events
Blink And Bounce: Timing is Key
Going Blind: XCB Metagaming - A Prolonged Conclusion.
The Science of Magic: Genetic Engineering, Part Two.
Shifting Lineaments: Casual Metagaming (Pt. 2).
The Dungeon Of Malefict: Pure Evil!
Land Week Introduction & Schedule.
Combofusion: Legends Timeshifted.
One Card to Rule Them All: Coastal Piracy
Irrational Love: Chimeras. The Lego's of Magic.