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The ability of the Panglacial Wurm to come out of the middle of your library at any time was a groundbreaking moment in Magic to me. I can't think of many cards that threaten an opponent merely because they are in their deck. I really hope to see more cards to expand this playstyle/mechanic. What to call it though? In effect, it's a self-tutor as it can be cast anytime you are searching your library. The issue with Panglacial Wurm is apparent though -- seven mana to cast. I mean how often are you searching your library and have seven mana free? Well, that's what inspired me in the end. I had a few simple choices to make, and it being land week I'll discuss how I came about to the first deck I created around Panglacial Wurm, and how more and more realizations about how important the land in the deck was to making the deck work. Acceleration vs. Fast Drop vs. Multiplication vs. Creation vs. Augmentation vs Reduction The first question I had to answer, was how exactly do I get the mana to play Panglacial Wurm? With five methods of making the card more playable, I had a few options to consider, although the choice was obvious fairly quickly. Since everyone is talking about lands this week, I won't bore you too much with details. Instead, I have an awesome chart. Who doesn't love charts?
My initial thoughts were to use a mix of basic and non-basic lands and utilize Farseek, Sakura-Tribe Elder, Rampant Growth and Kodama's Reach. The reason I was going with Farseek was the that I wanted a tinge of darkness to the Garden I was going to till for my little Wurm. I wanted it to have friends and I wanted them to be powerful. Afterall, when you have tons of mana, why not use it? Since the goal was to accelerate up to 9 mana as fast as possible to hard cast Panglacial Wurm from a search, my choice in creatures wasn't limited by casting cost. This lead me to another beautiful Coldsnap creature - Herald of Leshrac. Utilizing him, I now had a nasty Wurm hiding in my garden, and I had a gardener who tilled and brought in new plants all the time. Here is the initial version of my little garden.
Here was the problem though. While the deck did get nasty, the people I were testing against were heavy into Black White Blue control decks. So while my idea worked without a hitch, I was hardcasting Panglacial Wurms as early as turn four, I just couldn't swing with them. Wurm after Wurm met a Condem or Faith's Fetters. In most cases, the Hurricane game ender was used more for suicide than anything else. I know what you're saying, the problem is I have sixteen cards that do nothing, but fetch mana, but let me tell you one thing. Have you ever seen what happens when a person has 9+ lands on turn five? It gets nasty, and nasty fast. Alas, at this point, my Garden was fallow. I couldn't get a single victory with it, and even after they switched to nicer decks it was usually a fast kill Boros deck or a token swarm deck that would eat me alive before the Wurms could get out there to stop them. Most people would just discard the garden since I didn't get a single win out of 10 games. Not me, I tweaked it some, removed a few cards and ultimately tried a few different supplemental spells. That wasn't the problem, I was still losing no matter what 12 random spells I swapped in. It was at this point I deviated from the norm and took the same deck and went two completely opposite directions with it. One direction, was Leshrac and the Wurms were given a few nasty friends with names like Kokoshu, while in the other direction, the Garden itself did the biting with Natural Affinity. In one, direction, I was using even bigger even nastier creatures to cheese my opponent out, while in the other I was overrunning with land.
The problem was while these two decks were both now generating wins, they both missed a key compoment. Koko missed a finisher in stalemates while Natural Affinity missed that ability to survive a fast kill deck. Ultimately the solution became obvious, and the results made my friends cringe. For the next few weeks, everytime I sat down to a 1v1 or a 2hg, I almost certaintainly won, my little Garden had been pruned of all the weeds and what was left flourished. The missing piece of both the Natural Affinity and the Legendary Kill deck, was each other. The unification became dubbed the Garden of Destruction. It featured heavy creatures fast and furious and was able to end stalemates with a furious Natural Affinity Assault. If you doubt it's power, have you ever seen a Kokoshu fetched, cast, alongside a Panglacial Wurm on turn seven? I have, many times, and it always makes everyone cry. Here's my garden.
Now, why this still may look unthreatening to you, I ask you to try it out. The massive assault of creatures that demand answers early and fast will send many people scrambling. While there isn't a lot of card advantage, you don't need it. The natural thinning of the deck from fetchers guarantees interesting draws, while turning every tutor into a Panglacial Wurm with the proper mana. This creates a quasi card advantage and discernable power-rift. Spot control decks suffer because of every creature demanding a target, while Koko punishes anyone that dares to kill it, if necessary Myojin can completely erase a control deck's hand. The other issue is that no person ever sees the Natural Affinity finish unless they know it's in there. While you throw out creature after creature of massive size, you secretly hold onto your finish. Herald helps to tip the land balance in your favor, and when the time is right you unleash your 9 to 15 lands into a massive 2/2 alpha strike. I found this to be the perfect deck for land week as it brings about a few massive cards that deal with land.
Now that the Garden is no longer STD legal however, I updated it just for this article. I wanted to show you how it can grow and exist outside of a STD limited environment. There isn't a whole lot of change here, because the core of the garden is intact. To add too much would tear apart how it works regardless.
That's all for today's Irrational Love! ~Cashew
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When
Coldsnap (CSP) came out online, alot of the players I know were looking over the
card lists for interesting things to play. The obvious attention grabbers were
cards like Adarkar Valkyrie, Haakon, Stromgald Scourge, Ohran Viper, amongst
others, but one card in particular stuck out like a sore thumb to me -
Panglacial Wurm. Panglacial Wurm, is one of the few cards I can even think of
that by simply being in the library is a threat. While Flash and multiple
mechanics have really elevated the threat of the Hand and Graveyard fields,
Panglacial is one of the few that expand the threat of the Library which has
been generally overlooked thus far. Only recently have mechanics such as Ripple
begun to treat it as a threat. 
As
I said earlier, it was important for me to search my library in order to cast
Panglacial Wurm. So the only true choice of mana acceleration was to use the
land accelerators to pull in more land turn after turn. 
My
Little Garden. 
For
those of you who have never used this powerful combo, I want to talk about
both of these cards for a little bit. Early Harvest while seemingly simple
and straightforward, is one of the biggest sleeper cards in the game. Pro
players have used it to turn formats like Emperor onto it's head,
unleashing powerful combos and unstoppable recursion in all sorts of
decks. The biggest thing to know about Early Harvest is it only
on basic lands, no duals, coffers etc.