Since the dawn of organized time, humans beings have been reading reports about how other people did relatively well at Magic: the Gathering tournaments. And today we continue that grand tradition with another exciting tournament report – first place in the 5.27.23 MTGO Legacy Challenge with Old School RG Lands!

This is my first time winning a Challenge and I’m feeling pretty hyped and long-winded, so this report is gonna be a bit long. But don’t worry, I’ll break it into some sections for you so you can skip the rambling if you like:

Decklist
Musings about Lands
The Event Itself
Final Thoughts

Part 1 – Decklist

Part of the reason I was even motivated to play in the challenge this week was that Jarvis Yu had recently written an excellent Lands guide. I particularly liked it because Jarvis was coming at the deck from a relatively different angle than others have before. His list is a lot closer to traditional Lands, leaning hard on Loam and the core land-based engines to carry you through fair matchups, with respect to graveyard combo and Painter in the board.

The list I chose to play was pretty close to his. In particular note the 4 copies of Dark Depths and 3 copies of Maze of Ith. Many lists in the past weeks have been playing 3 Depths and 2 Maze in favor of other tools like Ancient Tomb to power of Sphere of Resistance, but to my mind that dilutes the core combo/control gameplan. Note also the inclusion of Manabond and Gamble. This version of the deck is heavily focused on assembling Loam plus an accelerant, and eschews the midrange cards that many other recent lists are playing (more on that later). Last, there are relatively few Saga targets in the maindeck and only one (Needle) that isn’t typically a good topdeck. Again, we’re focused on doing Lands things, no time for messing around with Shadowspears or Soul-Guide Lanterns.

Still, I did presume to improve upon the master and made some minor tweaks to Jarvis’ list. I swapped a Grove for a Canopy land, reasoning that since we were so much more focused on the Loam plan, we should play a land that can protect us against Surgical and other graveyard hate. I also swapped one of his Gambles for a Sylvan Library. The two cards fill very similar roles and I just felt I wanted a split.

In the sideboard I made further changes, cutting stuff like Trinisphere and Emrakul to lean in on graveyard hate. I also played a 2/1 Force of Vigor/Collector Ouphe split instead of just the full 3 Force of Vigor, and I played a second Minsc over the fourth Pyroblast. But these are relatively small changes overall and in essence, the deck was unaltered – I was just hedging for certain matchups.

With all that said, Jarvis’ approach to Lands in his guide got me thinking, and I hope you’ll forgive me if I wax philosophical for a bit about Lands and how it can be built. As a philosophy doctorate and a Lands player who is committed enough to have a Lands tattoo, I assure you am qualified.

Part 2 – Musings about Lands

Let’s ask ourselves a question – why is Lands any good? How can this pile of lands with miscellaneous abilities actually win games? To this we could give any number of answers. Maybe its the fact that we can attack from multiple angles, maybe it’s how broken Tabernacle is in conjunction with Wasteland, or maybe it’s just that we’re very good at abusing Urza’s Saga. All of these are true, but when it comes down to it there is one card whose printing brought this deck into existence, and there is one card that the deck fundamentally revolves around: Life from the Loam.

Lands is the Life from the Loam deck. Every card in the deck revolves around maximizing Life from the Loam. In return, Life from the Loam lets us cast Ancestral Recall every turn for the rest of the game. This is obviously busted as hell, and even before stuff like Depths combo and Urza’s Saga, Loam decks were a thing in Legacy. Those other printings only made the deck stronger and allowed it to keep up with power creep.

Viewed through the Loam-focused lens, we can see how all the cards in Lands fit together. Exploration and Manabond let you undo the basic drawback of Life from the Loam, which is the fact that you can only play one of the cards it gets you every turn. It’s no good drawing three cards a turn if you can only play one at a time, so lets go ahead and fix that. The rest of the deck follows the same pattern. Crop Rotation not only helps you find the right land to start recurring, but it also can fill the graveyard. Mox Diamond is the best mox in the game when you can get the land right back. Punishing Fire means more hits for Loam’s dredge, Maze and Tabernacle mean more time to capitalize on the value you get from Loam, and the Depths combo lets you turn your lands into something genuinely lethal. And Gamble, of course, is essentially just additional copies of Loam itself. All these cards are in the deck because they let you realize the full potential of Life from the Loam.

Now of course, Magic is complex, and I’ll grant this is only one way of seeing the deck, but I think it’s an interesting approach. If we now build on this, we can start thinking about how Lands should be built in the current day. Broadly speaking, there are probably three primary approaches to Lands in today’s community. First let’s say there’s Old School RG Lands of the kind I chose to play in this challenge. Second, there’s Sphere Lands, which plays 4 maindeck Sphere of Resistance as part of its core gameplan. And last there’s what you could call ‘Midrange Lands’ which plays more removal, more Saga targets and maindeck creatures like Endurance. This list from the recent Showcase is an example.

All three of these approaches are reasonable options. Sphere Lands and Midrange Lands both made top 8 of the recent Showcase Challenge, which is arguably harder than winning a regular Challenge, so I won’t sit here and say those versions are wrong or bad. But if we think of Lands as a Life from the Loam deck, it’s clear that these two are deviating from that plan. Sphere of Resistance has great synergy with Mox Diamond and Wasteland, sure. But Sphere of Resistance makes your busted spell that you want to cast every turn cost more mana, and doesn’t really help Loam do anything in its own right. And in order to accelerate out Spheres you have to play cards like Ancient Tomb which do nothing for Loam except make you pay extra life to cast it. To my mind, Sphere Lands is more of an Urza’s Saga deck than it is a Life from the Loam deck. Which is fine, because Saga is a very powerful card, fully capable of carrying a whole deck on its shoulders. But it seems to me that that deck would probably be 8cast or something with deeper prison and artifact elements, not a Lands shell with four additional Sphere of Resistance added in.

Which brings us then to Midrange Lands, which to be honest was probably the default way to build Lands until Jarvis’ guide was made public (that’s part of why I found his work refreshing). For a long time we’ve toned back the Loam plan because, well, Loam has lost a bit of its luster. Force of Negation being a common maindeck answer to the card, and Prismatic Ending answering a lot of the pieces Loam needs to really flourish both put a damper on the Loam engine. This, together with the way Urza’s Saga provided a pretty solid creature-oriented gameplan, pushed Lands players to hedge a little into a plan B. We started playing maindeck Endurances and Lightning Bolts, neither of which have any synergy with Life from the Loam, but both of which are just solid good cards. Add in Minsc and Boo and utility Saga targets, maybe a splash of blue cards, and you got yourself a stew!

However, this kind of deck often would play only 3 Depths, and sometimes even only 3 Stage and 2 Dark Depths. This isn’t because Dark Depths is bad in the current meta (actually, I think Lage is pretty good right now), but because it doesn’t fit the primary gameplan of just “playing the good cards.” You certainly wouldn’t see Gamble or Manabond in this kind of list either. Instead, you have your Shadowspears and Endurances taking up those slots.

Comparing Midrange Lands to the Old School RG Lands build that I took into the Challenge, it’s clear that the latter is much more focused on optimizing Life from the Loam. We play all the land-based threats together with extra accelerants and ways to find Loam. While things could change, I think this approach is best suited to the current meta. The blue decks are all trying to out-fair each other, so Force of Negation is almost absent from lists since it’s a two-for-one. These fair decks can’t really keep up with Landcestral Recall every turn, so they are easy prey for your engines. Post-board, they may have a handful of Surgical Extractions but if you maneuver carefully and extract maximum value from your Loams you can play through those well enough. There isn’t as much reason to split the difference and play midrange, and the Loam-focused way of building Lands with 4 Depths and extra tutors/accelerants allows for a lot more free wins where they just don’t have the answer and you quickly steamroll the opposition.

Ok, I think I’ll wrap this too-long aside up here. Hopefully it’s been interesting. It could certainly just be that I personally prefer the classic version of Lands, but I wanted to spend a bit of time thinking it through. What’s more, I think what I’ve said above is supported by the way the games played out. So thanks for joining me, and let’s get on to the games themselves!

Part 3 – The Event Itself

I had to wake up around 4am to play this thing so it was cold and dark in the house and my silly hairless cat was upset at being woken up but we padded over to the office and fired up the ol’ MTGO. I had put together the list the night before so I made myself a cup of tea, pulled a blanket over my legs, and sat down to wait for round 1.

Round 1 – UR Delver

Game 1: My opening hand has Grove, Exploration, Saga, Loam, Loam, Karakas, and Bog. We keep those. My opponent opens on Land, Ponder, which is everyone’s favorite Delver start to sit across from. A few turns later, I’ve Punished a Dragon’s Rage Channeler with Fire, but my opponent has an Iconoclast and maybe 5 tokens, so things aren’t looking too good.

Luckily I have Loam, Wasteland, and Exploration, plus a Saga about to hit three counters. I get to three, float the mana and go for Map into Tabernacle. Then Loam digs up Wasteland and my opponent is down to one land. After they pay for their Iconoclast, I pick up Punishing Fire with Grove and kill their last creature. They scoop.

Game 2: I keep a decent seven with Loam, Pyroblast, Map, Saga, Crop Rotation, Bog, and Taiga. Interaction and selection aplenty, but no acceleration. They lead on DRC into Bauble, and another DRC joins the first soon after. It’s the end step of my second turn when they Bolt me, hit Delirium, then untap and swing in for 6. I Bog them to buy some time and then Map into Blast Zone to clear the board.

At this point I’m at 8 with a pretty lackluster set of mana sources in play. My opponent has mana and a Wasteland, but no threat as yet. They burn a Surgical on my Saga after Wasting it and then play a True-Name Nemesis. Been a while since I’d seen that card. Unfortunately I can’t really kill it very fast so it gets a few hits in as I Loam up Blast Zone, tick it up to three, and activate it. But I’m only at 2 life and their next threat, together with a Wasteland for my Maze, wins them the game.

Game 3: This was a bit of a silly game. My opener has Wasteland, Saga, Endurance, Diamond and the mana to do all those things. They burn an early Wasteland on my Saga and start developing a board of Iconoclast tokens and Dragon Rage Channelers. However, my side of the field has an Endurnance and I’m at too high a life total for them to just attack me willy-nilly.

When I drop a Taberancle, they quickly give up their Iconoclast. And then I draw a second Endurance and start taking the fight to them. They chump with all their creatures and the board is clear, but the very next turn they land True-Name again. This time, however, I have more life than them (19 to 11) and I have two attackers and a Maze. I start attacking in and Mazing the one they block so it can’t die to Bolt.

A few turns of this go by and they are getting dangerously low on life. They develop a Murktide, but in the meantime I’ve found a Saga and a Depths to go with my Stage. We get there.

1-0

Round 2 – RUG Delver

Game 1: I’m on the draw and my hand has Mox, Punishing Fire, and, you guessed it, a ton of lands (Wasteland and Tabernacle notable among them). They lead on Trop into Delver. I try to bait them into Dazing my Mox so I can Tabernacle their Delver, but they don’t go for it so I settle for just playing the Tabernacle.

I Waste their next land and am taking hits while I slowly develop my mana when they play an Urza’s Saga. Was not expecting that. Luckily Tabernacle makes it awkward for them to make constructs, so it’s still just Delver beats. Saga threatens to be threatening for a few turns but eventually I assemble the combo and kill them. Saga is cool tech for Delver and it did find a Soul-Guide Lantern that ate my Punishing Fire. Still, not sure it’s the move in general.

Game 2: My opening hand has Loam, Exploration, Map, and Wasteland. Easy keep. They Force my Exploration, which makes me sad, and they have a Delver starting to beat me down. Goyf then joins Delver and I’m just sitting here thinking about what have I missed, where have I been? Delver players are really digging deep these days with Goyfs and Sagas and Iconoclasts and True-Names.

All these old cards are starting to actually chunk me pretty hard and they have the Force of Negation for my Loam. However, with all this done they are pretty low on resources. I manage to land an Endurance, which shrinks their Goyf down to a 2/3 so that they can’t really attack at all. A few turns later I’ve assembled Stage+Depths (playing 4 Depths is gas) and the game is over.

2-0

Round 3 – Painter

Game 1: I’m on the play and my hand makes Lage on turn 2 if I can only draw a land. I draw a land.

Game 2: They play Magus of the Moon. I play Collector Ouphe. Their creatures are better at attacking and I don’t find Punishing Fire.

Actually to be fair it wasn’t that simple; they did some very cool stuff where they recurred Breya’s Apprentice with Welders since they couldn’t meaningfully attack with their ground creatures into my 2/2, so that was kinda cool.

Game 3: After seeing Magus (and I should have known this for game 2) I bring in Minsc and Boo since he’s an utter beating against fair decks, especially if my opponent keeps a hand that’s Magus plus not much else.

I am rewarded when my opening hand has two Diamonds, Saga, Stage, Minsc, and some other random lands. That’s a turn two Hamster, baby. I make a Hamster. They make a Bridge to Ensnare it. I fling my Hamster at their face to draw 4 cards. This finds me Depths so next turn I fling Marit Lage at their face to win the game.

3-0

Round 4 – Nic Fit

I like playing against Nic Fit because their deck is just cool and does nifty stuff. Also they have essentially no answers to Marit Lage so I can acknowledge the coolness of their deck while also not feeling threatened by it. 4 Depths gang rise up!

Game 1: I have to mull to 5 to find a reasonable hand. That hand has Diamond, Dark Depths, Wasteland, Waterlogged Grove, and Crop Rotation. It’s only 5 cards, but if I can just avoid having the Crop Rotation plucked from my hand, these 5 cards will make us a turn 3 20/20.

They get out two Veteran Explorers, and although they are able to sacrifice both of them and get a pile of lands, it’s ultimately not important. Marit Lage joins the fray and the witch sweeps all before her.

Game 2: My opponent correctly boards in Leyline of the Void, but my hand doesn’t have Loam. Instead, it has Diamond, Exploration, Stage, Stage, Saga, Maze, and Grove. Saga into Map means we have the combo already, and when I draw Crop Rotation that means we have it on turn two.

Their Collector Ouphe trips me up a bit but I draw a mana source off the top and make a turn 2 Lage. They cast Deed and pop it for zero in what I can only be the last gesture of the doomed, shaking their fist at the sky as Marit Lage devours the universe.

4-0

Round 5 – Reanimator

At this point I’m feeling pretty psyched. The next two rounds are both win and ins for me, since all the 5-1s will top 8. Just gotta pull out one more win!

Game 1: I look them up so I know they’re on Reanimator, but even on a mull to 5 the best I can do is find a hand that has natural Bojuka Bog. Hopefully that’s good enough?

Spoiler: it isn’t.

Game 2: Looking at their recent finishes, it seems like this player doesn’t play Show and Tell, which is nice because bringing in Pyroblast really screws up my board plan. In Game 2 I’m able to find a 6 that can Crop Rotate on turn 1, though it’s pretty bad aside from that.

Unfortunately, my opponent has a very good 5-card hand that allows them to end step Entomb turn 1 and then use Dark Ritual to set up Exhume into the follow-up Entomb when I go to Bog them. I do exile a creature, but there’s still a creature there when Exhume resolves, and my hand is pretty trash, so I’m dead.

First loss of the event, but that’s ok. My opponent had turn 1 with protection and then turn 2 through Bog on a mull to 5, not much we can do there.

4-1

Round 6 – Sneak & Show

When I saw that I was paired against JPA for this round I almost just gave up on the event. Two win-and-ins and they were both against combo. And the second was against the deck that is my nemesis, piloted by a master no less.

Still, I always say that even your bad matchups in Legacy are never quite that bad since every deck is doing powerful things. Maybe we can hit the right side of variance and pull through.

Game 1: My hand has Exploration and Saga plus Wasteland, so I keep figuring I can maybe pressure them a bit. I’d prefer a combo hand but this is probably as good as it gets without mulling to oblivion.

I play out the Exploration into the Saga and soon we’re making Constructs. When Saga pops off I grab Needle to block Griselbrand, though in retrospect this may have been wrong since my opponent was getting low on life already – Sneak Attack might have been better. In the meantime they’re cantripping around to find their combo.

They do manage to put in Sneak Attack, and I go into the tank. I have two 4/4 constructs and my opponent is at 7. I have a Maze in play, Needle on Griselbrand, plenty of mana, and Crop Rotation in my hand. They have 3 unknown cards and two Lotus Petals to activate Sneak Attack with.

I can’t beat two Sneak Attack activations with just my Crop Rotation into Karakas. But I can Maze my attacker to stop them from gaining life. So I just go in for the attack. Luckily they only have one giant lifelinker – Griselbrand. Atraxa would have been worse since that would refuel them. I Maze my blocked attacker and put them to three. Then I rotate for Karakas on my turn, just to play around a hardcast Force of Will.

Luckily they don’t have anything else to put in and they scoop after seeing their next card. Snuck by on that one!

Game 2: I mull to 6 to find a hand that has Loam, Dark Depths, and Exploration. No actual interaction for their combo, but we can make Lage fast with this hand if we only find the other piece. And I play 10 copies of the other piece so…

I draw Map, it resolves, and they scoop with the combo on board. We got there!

5-1

Quarterfinals – Reanimator

This was the same player as we met in Round 5, and I was eager for revenge. Reanimator is actually not a bad matchup for Lands since we have game one interaction with Crop Rotation and Karakas, and we can always just make a 20/20 and overpower whatever creature they’ve put in. Still, one never can tell since their deck can go very fast and play through interaction pretty well.

Game 1: My opener has Crop Rotation, Diamond, Depths, and two Loams. This means I can interact with their combo and threaten my own if they go slow.

They are on the play but on a mull to 5 and they play Swamp into Thoughtseize. I look at my hand and I realize I have no colored lands – Diamond is my only green source. The cute play here is to Seize the Diamond and strand my whole hand. However, I’m much more likely to draw another green source than I am to draw another Crop Rotation, and Crop Rotation is my primary avenue of interaction. So I think Seizing Diamond here is a trap.

Luckily, it’s one my opponent falls into. They take Diamond. I draw Stage: combo assembled. Then I draw a green source. Luckily their hand was slow so it’s not too late and I play the land to hold up Crop Rotation. This means that while they are able to go for it before my Lage comes together, I have Crop Rotation for Bog, and then I make Lage before they can try a second time.

Game 2: I mull to 5 on the draw but my hand is straight gas. My opponent also mulled to 5 so I’m pretty confident that they can’t beat my grip of Surgical, Endurance, Crop Rotation, Fetch, Grove.

Their hand is understandably slow so nothing happens for a bit. When I draw a Grafdigger’s Cage a couple turns later it feels like the last nail in the coffin. So with that in play, although they are able to Unmask my Endurance, their only action is hardcasting Grief, which they do with a Dark Ritual. In response to this, I rotate for Saga. Saga is a much faster clock than 3/2 menace, and it finds a Soul-Guide Lantern to join my Cage. We get there.

6-1

Semifinals – MonoBrown Aggro

I looked this player up and saw that they were on some deck with Karn, the Great Creator. I hate that card. I glanced at the rest of the list and assumed it was one of those insane Mystic Forge decks that just dump their entire hands and kill you in two turns.

Luckily it was not one of those decks. Instead, it was essentially a reworking of the old Eldrazi aggro decks, this time with artifacts instead of Eldrazi. Karn, Scion of Urza, Saga, and Nettlecyst means you have a ton of Construct-type things floating around, and they can hit very hard very fast. That said, Eldrazi has always been a good matchup for Lands, even if it’s very play/draw dependent thanks to Chalice.

Game 1: I’m on the play, which is good, but I have to mull 5, which is bad. I end up keeping a very sketchy hand of Loam, Map, Crop Rotation, Saga, Stage. I figure I can Map for a green source and hope for the best. At this point I’m still thinking they’re on Forge combo so my main plan is to play for Lage, which this hand also sorta does, albeit slowly.

I play Stage into Map, but they Waste my Stage right away. Still, I get a little lucky and draw a green source (16 green sources is great), so it’s not all bad. They drop a Chalice, which blanks my Crop Rotation, and then play Wasteland into Nettlecyst. In the meantime I’ve managed to Loam back the original Stage, so with Map I can assemble the combo pretty soon here.

Although my plan is pretty telegraphed (I have Stage and Map in play), my opponent does not keep up their Wasteland. Instead, they tap out for Karn, Scion of Urza. I’m guessing they wanted the pressure since Nettlecyst was just a 2/2 at the start of their turn.

But hey, when you get an opening, you exploit it. So I know I’m going for the combo, but I tank a bit on what to do with Saga when it hits the last chapter. My options are really just Needle or another Map, so it’s gotta be Needle, but what to name? I look at the list of theirs I saw online and think about what can beat Lage… it’s their 1-of Karakas. So I name Karakas and Lage takes us home.

Game 2: This time I’m on the draw, which means a turn one Chalice can snag my Explorations, turning a good hand into a pretty bad one. That’s pretty much what happens. I have to mull to 5 again, but Lands mulls pretty well and my 5 is pretty cracked. I have Loam, Diamond, Exploration, Stage, and Wasteland. If Exploration resolves and they don’t have Leyline, this hand should win pretty handily.

Unfortunately they have the turn 1 Chalice. So I have to be content with just playing Diamond into Loam and going slowly. My opponent, however, is not going slowly, and they have Rishadan Ports and Wastelands of their own to slow me down further. They play Karn, Scion and pump out a couple constructs. I can’t defend myself against this on top of Wastelands and their Sagas, so I go under pretty quick.

Game 3: In this game my opening 7 is Exploration, Diamond, Forest, Wasteland, Stage, Taiga, Maze. This kind of hand is the classic Lands trap hand where you have a ton of acceleration but no actual engine or action.

But I keep it anyway. Not because I’m a risk-taker, but because this hand has a lot of very live draws, together with the tools to stall for a bit. With Stage in hand, we have 10 cards that make a 20/20, six of which make it on turn 2. On top of that we can find Loam or Saga off the top as additional engines. Saga would even get us to the 20/20 if we want it to. So while it’s not all of anything, it’s half of every great pair in the deck, so any other half completes us nicely.

They mull to 6 and I lead on the dream Lands opener of Diamond into Exploration into two lands for 3 mana on turn 1. Their first turn is Tomb for Ratchet Bomb to destroy my Mox. That’s fine. I draw Force of Vigor and Waste their Tomb. I just need the game to go slow so I can assemble something here.

Next turn brings me a Map, so the combo isn’t too far off. Then I draw Loam and it’s off to the races. They do get some pressure on me with Karn, Scion again, and they have a Karakas for my first Lage. But Loam plus Exploration is pretty hard to beat and their deck can’t really disrupt it without Leyline. I Waste their Karakas and make Lage again, stopping to Force of Vigor their constructs on the way. We’re on to the finals.

7-1

Finals – UB Shadow

I looked this player up and saw they favored Doomsday, so I figured I was in for a struggle. After the first couple turns it became evident that they were playing Shadow and I relaxed a little. Shadow is a pretty good matchup for Lands.

Game 1: I go to 6 and keep Diamond, Loam, Gamble, Grove, Depths, Wasteland. They Force my Diamond though, which I thought was interesting. This was maybe a high-variance play where they could conceivably have tagged my only green source but if they guess wrong they basically just submitted to a zero mana Hymn. Though it does slow me down, of course.

So I just play out Grove. It’s been a while since I’ve played with Gamble and I thought about Gambling for Exploration here but I didn’t since I only have four cards in hand. They Thoughseize my Gamble on their turn, so it doesn’t really matter anyway I guess.

From here the game moves pretty slowly. I cast Loam, but they Daze it. I don’t mind too much since they haven’t developed any threat aside from a Strix in the meantime.

Eventually a Loam resolves and I put in Tabernacle. We begin a merry game of sacrificing Strix to Tabernacle only to cast Reanimate on it to draw a card again. Which again, is fine with me. My life total isn’t going down, so I’m happy. This goes on until they play out Death’s Shadow. At this point the field looks like this:

They sacrifice the Strix to Tabernacle. So now, what’s the play? I want to make Marit Lage here, but I’m torn on what land to sacrifice. I could sac the Tabernacle, but that land is doing good work for me. I could sac the Wasteland, but I want to Waste them. And if I sacrifice Yavimaya, make Lage, and Waste them, then I won’t have mana for Loam next turn.

So I opt to sacrifice Grove. This line is pretty bad if they have Wasteland plus an answer to Lage, but they pitched Petty Theft to Force of Will way back on turn one. Unfortunately, they do have exactly Petty Theft + Wasteland. When the dust settles I have just a Tabernacle in play, and they have a 3/3 Death’s Shadow. In retrospect I should have led with Wasteland and then moved to the draw step when they floated mana – this would have let my Yavimaya live to see another day, at the very least. But hindsight is 20/20, just like the Lage they stole from me.

The next turn their Shadow grows to an 8/8 and I know I will be dead soon. But luckily Lage smiles on those who summon her as often as I do: I draw Maze of Ith. Even the Shadow of Death itself cannot escape Ith’s confounding Maze, and I soon draw a green source to start Loaming. My opponent, however, has three Daze in row and a Force of Will on top of all that, so it’s a tense few turns of praying to dodge Wasteland. But finally a Loam resolves and that, together with an Exploration I had drawn earlier, puts the game quickly out of their reach.

Game 2: I keep a 7 with a Diamond, Saga, Pyroblast, Stage, Grove, Wasteland, and Fetch. Seems fine. I draw an Exploration and start going off to the races. When they Wasteland my Saga though I’m a bit worried since that’s basically all my gas.

So I play Stage, copy my Wasteland, and then Waste their Watery Grave. Apparently that was their only land, because they miss their land drop the next turn. So while they do have two Surgical Extractions and cast both of them to gut my deck of Loams and Sagas, they also don’t have any mana to do anything else. Eventually I draw the Depths to go with my Stage and activate it to make Marit Lage, a 20/20 black avatar creature token with Flying and Indestructible.

8-1

Part 4 – Final Thoughts

My final thought is this: Lands is awesome! Ok but seriously it is a very fun deck and I hope more people pick it up, even if that means that Delver will start playing Blood Moon to beat us. I actually think there is an interesting phenomenon in Legacy where there are many viable decks, but most decks are quite tricky, with lots of specialized lines and narrow windows for optimal play (you’ll notice I mentioned just a few of the times I misplayed in this event above). What that adds up to is that there are decks that are well-positioned, but which have a very small player pool and relatively few experienced players in any given event. The result is what actually happened with Lands – no finishes after the bannings, and then 3 in the top 16 of the Showcase and decent results in the last two weekends of Challenges.

Then, as more people pick up the deck, the win rate will fall because it’s tricky to play and easy to hate. And in the long run that leads to the nice cyclical metagame we all love. All this to say, don’t discount a deck just because it has no finishes for a while. Fair blue puts something in every top8 because 50% of the field is fair blue. If your pet deck isn’t rocking it out lately, chances are it also only has 0-1 players in any given event, so don’t let that stop you from playing it (though if you’re still playing Sylvan Plug in 2023 maybe you can give that one up).

As for the deck itself, I think probably one of the fetches should be the second Yavimaya, and the 3rd Punishing Fire is probably a flex slot. That said, play 4 Depths, play 3 Maze, play Lands, and have fun! And let’s all collectively pray that fair blue keeps cannibalizing itself, that Reanimator remains the only true combo deck with a meaningful meta share, and that Toxicrene never comes to MODO. Thanks for reading this way-to-long tournament report all the way to the end. Until next time, may your life be full of loam and your loam be full of life.

Noted Lands Master Jarvis you has chosen to make his Lands guide free and available to the public. A link to his guide can be found here. His initial announcement on Twitter is here.

If you wish to support Jarvis’s work, you can support him on Twitch and YouTube, among other places.

Three top 8s in one month with RUG Lands 

On April 2nd I played the Bazaar of Boxes tournament in the Netherlands and wrote a tournament report about it which can be found here. 

Following that tournament, I played two more tournaments with RUG Lands: Bottrop, Germany on April 23rd and Dutch Open Series on April 30th. 

Bottrop, Germany. 70+ players 

My alarm went off at half past six to travel to Amsterdam and then drive two and a half hours to Bottrop with three friends. When I ordered a cocktail a couple of hours before, at around two o’clock, I knew I would regret it later. 

Super tired and with a hangover, we were on our way to a tournament held every month. A great tournament in a good location, with fantastic catering and 70+ Legacy enthusiasts.

In the end there were more than ten Dutch players and we were determined to beat those Germans in their own house 😉 

My list was the same as for the BoB series a short while before: 

 
I played the exact same list for two reasons: it was well-constructed and I was too lazy to do anything about it to change it. Here’s a visual: 

Disclaimer: I use better arts. 

When it comes to Attractions, I already wrote my findings in my last report. But I noticed these two tournaments something else. Not only did it not throw my opponents off their game, many of them had never even heard of it! I had to explain to them what Attractions was, how it works, and they even wanted me to show them after the match. Mission failed successfully.  

With 71 cards in the deck, the 61st card being Field of the Dead, I was ready to take on all challengers! 

Round 1. Daniel on Omnishow – 2-0 

In the first game, I was on the draw and had a fast Urza’s Saga hand, which allowed me to go for the beatdown plan. My opponent had a Brainstorm and a Ponder on their turn two, but failed to draw a land. On their third turn, they played a fetch but chose not to crack it. My Saga then went to three and I used a Pithing Needle on their Scalding Tarn, which resulted in me winning the game. 

In the second game, my opponent had a turn two Show and Tell and put Omniscience into play with a Force of Will for my Force of Vigor. Afterwards, they bricked and it took me only a couple of turns to put Dark Depths and Thespian’s Stage into play on my side of the table. This allowed me to win the game. 

Round 2. Bjorn on Mono R Stompy 2-0 

Game 1 I’m on the play and mull to five. I have a Minsc & Boo and a Saga that doesn’t get Blood Mooned. The game is quickly over. 

In game 2 my opponent has a Chalice on 1 and some Goblin guys. He has few cards left and wants to attack. I politely ask if I can cast Kozilek’s Return and it turns out he has no permission spells. From an empty board I take the game with a Minsc & Boo. 

Round 3. Dirk on Bant Stoneforge 2-0 

I’m on the draw for game 1 and my opponent gets a Kaldra into play and then also a Batterskull. I’m working towards a Field of the Dead boardstate on my side, but my life total is under pressure. I do have a Loam + Exploration loop though. My opponent has very few cards in hand. To get some more time, I call upon Marit Lage for assistance. She swoops in and gets immediately exiled. I’m back up to 24 and I can keep going. She’s a keeper. 

Gradually my army of zombies grows and eventually his KaldraSkull gets overwhelmed. I win game 1. 

In game 2 I have a classic hand with Mox, Grove of the Burnwillows, Punishing Fire, Loam and the combo. My opponent plays Stoneforge, I Punishing Fire it. He protects it with FOW. I take the turn and play Grove, get Punishing Fire back and kill Stoneforge. Then I play my combo, Loam again to get a Wasteland back and my opponent can’t do much about it. 

Three times 2-0. Is this going to be one of those days again?  
No. Because in the next round I’m playing the mirror and I lose game 1. 

Round 4. Tobias on Lands 1-1 

I’m on the play and I mull to a mediocre six. My opponent plays a fast Library and I already know how this is going to go. He has all the answers, all the engines and I get overrun. He plays it well and I give up. 

The next game is an interesting one. I mull to six and I’m on the play. I have all the green cards that I’d want to see and a black one: Surgical Extraction. However, I only have one land. A fetch land.  

I play my land and say go. My opponent plays a land and passes the turn. Then I draw five turns without a land. On the other side of the table, the combo is put down and he goes for it. I fetch, crop for a Karakas and bounce. Then I draw two more turns without a land. 

In the meantime, I have surgically removed something. I think it was his Stage, but I’m not sure. 

Eventually, I find a Ghost Quarter and GQ my Karakas to finally have some green, so I can Loam too. My opponent has no answer to my Loam and my Exploration and I start playing lands. About ten turns later, I had everything: Field of the Dead was live, I had Minsc & Boo, Loam+Exploration+Wasteland+Ghostquarter. When my opponent conceded, we had seven minutes left and we decided not to play any further. Time for a breather. 

Round 5. Markus on Mono Black Helm 2-0 

These two games were pretty simple since my opponent apparently picked up the ‘wrong half’ of their deck. I didn’t see any combo pieces, except for Dauthi, which I killed with a Bolt. I won pretty easily. A good line was that I made sure to have a construct token before I summoned Marit Lage in order to play around removal. That new Edict. 

Round 6. Michael on Sneak and Show 2-1 

My opponent came over a bit grumpy after I presented my Attractions deck. He didn’t know what it was and everyone around us said he was behind on the developments. Attractions are, of course, the new craze in Legacy. He asked (rightfully) if this was Magic or Yu-Gi-Oh! 

Game 1 I played a pre-emptive Pithing Needle on Sneak Attack. I think that was a good one and I got him down to zero with a Marit Lage. 

Game 2 I didn’t really get a say with a Show and Tell into an Omniscience into Atraxa into Emrakul. I asked him if this was Magic or Solitaire. (I didn’t actually ask this.) 

Game 3 was a fun pot. For me that is. Michael mulled to five and I kept seven. Not much happens in the first few turns since he has a quick Blood Moon and he is also a bit flatlined by it. It’s draw-go for a few turns but I pick up 2 Pyroblasts and Force of Vigor and a green card and wait for the right moment since my Dark Depths are already in the game with zero counters on the Mountain. He hardcasts a Brazen Borrower, wanting to put pressure on my life total. I Pyroblast that to buy some more time. He plays his second Blood Moon and I decide to Force of Vigor it end of his turn. He counters with FOW and I counter back with Blast. One of my Mountains turns into a Dark Depths with zero counters on it and the rest is history. 

I went into the last round with a record of 5-0-1, and instead of having a top 8, we just played seven rounds and then dished out the prizes. If I won this round, I’d be crowned the champion of the tournament. 

Round 7. Dennis on Naya Depths 0-2  

Dennis is a great player and an excellent Naya Depths pilot. This is a tough matchup for me, especially when my opponent knew what he was doing.  

Game 1 was a struggle because he had a Knight and an Elvish Reclaimer and when I took over the initiative, he went for a main phase Marit Lage without protection. I guess he was thinking, either you win on the spot or I do. I couldn’t find an answer and we went to game 2.  

Game 2 was also super close with a lot of complex lines. Eventually he had a strong board state that I could have wiped out with Kozilek’s Return, but I was one mana short of activating my own Elvish Reclaimer to get Bojuka Bog and shrink his Knight and Reclaimer.  

I could kill his Safekeeper and bounce his Marit Lage during my turn after untapping, but his Knight and Reclaimer stayed alive on an empty board. I had two more turns when his 8/8 knight started attacking, and on the last turn I had an answer in Crop Rotation for Field of the dead or Marit Lage, but his Reclaimer stayed behind and he got to fetch Steppe for lethal.  

Good job to Dennis and he ended up first place.  

I ended up fourth with a score of 5-1-1 and you can find the top 8 decklists here.

I got to choose between the prizes as fourth pick and won two beautiful Scalding Tarns and a deckbox. 

It was a really fun tournament, well worth the trip but next time without a hangover. Met some great people and on the 25th of June there’s an ELM qualifier which I’m planning on attending. It was nice to be recognized for my deck by some people, but probably more for my Attractions.

The Dutch Open Series, Netherlands. 111 players

It was the grand opening of the biggest Magic: The Gathering tournament in the Netherlands, after a few years of having to close the doors due to COVID. This was the first event, but if they keep going at the same rate as before the pandemic, then this tournament will take place four times a year. In addition, there are qualifiers throughout the country and you can qualify for the Championship tournament at the end of the year. They used to also have the ‘Player of the Year’ award for the player who had earned the most points throughout the year, not only in the four tournaments but also in the smaller, affiliated tournaments from all over the Netherlands. I can’t remember who the last ‘Player of the Year’ was though. 

They host Pioneer, Sealed, Modern and Legacy every time. I don’t know the player numbers for Pioneer and Sealed, but Modern had 125+ players this time, so it’s very popular. 

It was great to meet people I also encountered in Bottrop (Germany) and also a Belgian crew. It was fantastic to see how Legacy is alive and people from the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany visit each other’s tournaments! 

My Deck

This time I wasn’t too lazy to change my deck and I made a meta prediction. I came up with this, based on ~70 players: 

I was debating whether to stick with blue in my list because I expected fewer Red decks (than in the last two tournaments) and Choke seemed strong. I also really wanted three Maze of Ith due to all the creatures. 

So I just decided to do exactly that: I replaced Ipnu Rivulet with a third Maze and replaced an Endurance in the sideboard with a Choke. I was only playing one (Tropical) Island… 

I had tested one league online with that list and went 5-0, so the science proved me right, though I was aware that the manabase was quite greedy. I replaced one Minsc with a Sylvan Library to have some extra filtering options. 

I still decided to keep my 71 cards, including Attractions. This time for the meme. 

Round uno. Tim on UB Ninjas 2-0 

Despite a judge call for an important moment in Game 1, Tim and I had a good vibe and it was a relaxed experience as well as competitive Magic. The judge call was about this: Tim hacked a Ninja into the game and I wanted to cast Crop Rotation for a Karakas before damage. My opponent said okay and I picked up part of my deck. At that moment he said: “oh wait, I wanted to response.” I had already seen a card from my deck.  

Should the Crop resolve – yes or no? 

The judge decided no and the moment was rolled back. I was okay with the decision. Tim did say it pretty quickly after the “okay”. Game 1 of a big tournament, no need to waste too much energy on this. 

I built up a board state that gave me a good lock and since I watched a lot of Ninja movies when I was a kid, I knew exactly what to do and he conceded to not waste too much time. 

Game 2 was pretty much the same: I built a board that could answer anything. I got Choke and it resolved. I had previously used a Saga to grab a Needle and put it on his unused Prismatic Vista. He then got two more Vista’s. My Tabernacle did a lot of work for his two creatures, which I had Mazes for. Although he could tap his Vista’s for green through my Yavimaya which I still needed, as I had little colored sources and a Trop which stayed tapped… 

In the end I locked the game and he eventually conceded when we were running out of time. 

Conclusion Game 1: I was happy with my third Maze. I was glad with Choke. My Trop was painful. I got into trouble with my colored sources. Just as predicted! 

Round 2. Peter on RB Reanimator 2-0 

It is almost impossible for Lands to win against Reanimator game 1. I was also on the draw. My opponent, Peter, was playing it slow. Too slow. Maybe he had the wrong hand, I don’t know. But I played multiple Sagas on my side. Off of the first one I got Soul-Guide Lantern, and off of the second one a Map to get Bojuka Bog. So I answered his GY a couple of times and still had Soul-Guide up. My Constructs started swinging, and the bleeding didn’t stop. 

Game 2 he mulled to five. So did I, but I had two answers: Endurance + pitch, and Surgical. I didn’t even look at the rest of my hand. 

Peter went all-in with his five cards. Land, Unmask + pitch to target Griselbrand and playing Reanimate. I asked politely if I could answer with Surgical and he politely said he’d give up in response. 

Score: 2-0. Twice 2-0. Is this going to be one of those days again?! 
Nope. Because Round 3 was against Enchantress. 

Round 3. Robin on Enchantress 0-2. 

Robin was a friendly chap and reminded me that we had played in Amsterdam years ago. I thought to myself: “I have no idea what you’re playing, Robin, but you seem to know what I’m playing. I hope I can catch you off guard with my Attractions.” He seemed to not know what Attractions were, so there went my plan. 

Game 1 I was on the play, but I had little interaction with what he was doing. Just when I finally had my combo ready at the end of his turn, he casts Devoid Druid in his first main phase. A card I hadn’t seen too often, but it rang a bell, though I wasn’t sure why. Then he puts Swift Configuration on the stack and I can tell by looking at him that the question of whether that card resolved was a big one. It did and before I knew it, Emrakul was on the board. BAM! 

Game 2 I had Exploration with Dark Depths, 2 other lands and a Crop Rotation. Just one more land and I would have Marit Lage. But I didn’t draw a land for three turns. I had some interaction with his engines, but he always drew at least one card of his engines and I was losing cards. I tried to hold on, but couldn’t. One for one removal just didn’t cut it. 

When he had 10 cards in hand and I had two, I threw in the towel.  

Score: 2-1. No big deal, right? RIGHT? 

Round 4. Teun on Reanimator. 1-1-1 

2-1. No biggie, until I saw the pairings and knew that my opponent was playing Reanimator. 

I was on the play and mulled to five with no Crop Rotation. I didn’t want to go any lower and decided to keep the hand. What if he didn’t play Reanimator after all and I mulligan into oblivion. He kept six. 

Eventually, he had a slow hand and was throwing creatures into his graveyard with Looting. I had Exploration and two lands in play and an Expedition Map in my hand, and my next draw would have to be a land to play the Map, crack it, and play Bojuka Bog to gain some time. 

I drew… a Maze! Aagh! 

My opponent takes the turn and hacks all kind of big creatures into play.  

Game 2 I keep seven and he six. I’m keeping a hand with a green source and two Crop Rotations, plus a Soul-Guide. I play the Soul-Guide turn 1 to get it in play. He plays discard and picks one of the Crops. Ultimately, it’s a bit of a longer game because I have a few answers. I have a Saga with two counters, and he plays after some good sequencing a Magus of the Moon. He knew I had a Blue Blast and played a Looting first. I hesitated to counter it, because I wanted to save it for the Magus. I still decided to counter the Looting and he then played Petal and Magus. I gave him props, but with that props on the stack, I made a Construct token with the Saga. 

I start swinging in for three slowly and at some point I Bolt his Magus. Then I draw an Endurance and when he wants to target a creature in his graveyard at the last moment, I play my Endurance and he conceded. 

For game 3 we still have a few minutes. I don’t want to lose, because then I’m out of the tournament. I have no hate in my hand and mull. And mull. And mull… to three! Three cards without GY hate. I kept one land, Force of Vigor, and an Exploration. Hopefully he goes for the Animate Dead route. 

He bricked on his first two Lootings and does not do much. Eventually we go into turns he finally gets a Griselbrand in play, but it’s turn 2 in turns and he only has one turn after this one. He draws cards and has three life. I take the turn and there are many people watching. I do play Bolt in my deck… 

I tap my fist on my deck, everyone holds their breath, I draw a Bolt and win the Pro Tour finals! 

No, I draw a random card and pass the turn. He attacks, goes to ten, draws cards and stands at three again. But then he plays an Archon and goes to six and passes the turn. I draw another random card in my last turn and it’s a draw and I get away with it. 

Score: 2-1-1. Now just win everything… 

Round 5: Alex on Bant NO Show 2-1 

Yes!! Another tough matchup! I won game 1 on Construct beats. Game 2, he had a quick Natural Order into Progenitus. No interaction there. Game 3 was a long one. I ended up with 47 life and the match went into time again. I had a Choke doing some heavy lifting. He only had two lands, a green and a white. I had some lands and a Trop that stayed tapped. At one point, I had a Spell Pierce in hand and drew an Expedition Map. He had two lands, like I said. I played Map and got an Otawara which I also played. In the next turn, he played an important spell which I could Spell Pierce. He had to smile and cry a bit. Spell Pierce from lands with an Otawara, really?  

Alex is a chill guy I play locally with, so everything’s cool. I even decided to give him some life with my Grove of the Burnwillows once in a while. Eventually, I resolved a Minsc & Boo and it was a race against the clock. A draw and I’m out of the tournament! He then finds a Swords and an Ending. So he answers my token two times and has an Ice-Fang.  

Finally, I take turn five and he’s on three life, as he had to fetch in his last turn. He has an Ice-Fang in play, one card in hand and I get a token from Minsc, have a 3/4 Reclaimer in play and draw an Endurance. I activate -2 from Minsc and hold priority to then cast Endurance. He concedes and I’m proud of my sequencing, while everyone had gathered around at this point since Jordy went into time again. 

Round 6. Robbert on Cephalid Breakfast 2-0 

Robert got off to a rough start, mulling to five on game one, while I got to play an Elf on the play. He didn’t have any Swords for the first two turns, so I didn’t have to worry about that. I went for Marit Lage token and won.  

I boarded wrong though, seeing two Tundras and an Island and put him on UWr control. He played Underground Sea, Aether Vial, Go. And I was like, okay, okay… 

I had a Wasteland in hand, a green source, a Pithing Needle and Exploration, so I played the Needle on his Aether Vial. He then played a Tundra and started Brainstorming and Pondering. I then aggressively Crop Rotated for Wasteland, played my second Wasteland, and put him back to zero lands, fearing a quick combo from his side. He took his third turn, didn’t play a land and said go. I started Loaming and ran away with the game thanks to a Saga. He later played a Saga of his own, but I had Wasteland ready. 

Non-game. He revealed his hand and had all the good cards. But my Needle and Wastelands exactly answered his weak spots.  

Score: 4-1-1. If I win the last game, I might make top 8. 

I decided to do a bit of scouting around the tables and got a good idea of the decks I could face. Nice variation of decks. Hoping for a Death’s Shadow deck with my three Mazes and Choke. I saw a friend playing Painter who made top 8 at the Bazaar of Boxes in Tilburg with Mississippi River, and I got paired against him. Too bad, because only one of us was playing for top 8. 

Round 7. Mark on Painter 2-1 

Painter is a good matchup for me. I know the matchup well and I’m playing blue in my sideboard. I win the die roll and start. I look at my seven and see some really good spells and Mox Diamond. However, I only see two lands. Two Maze’s of Ith. Damn. I mull. 

I’m punished by beatdowns of his creatures due to a too slow six. 

Games 2 and 3 are beautiful. In Game 2 I keep a hand with everything I need. But, the Expedition Map must stay alive until the next turn. I play Mox, land, Map. 

He plays Saga, Needle. I think and decide to Pierce. I really need the Map to get going. The Pierce ended up being lethal since he was all in on the Saga plan and I can now Wasteland him out the game with Map for Wasteland and the full Loam + Exploration nuts. I have full control and he conceded to save time. 

Game 3. I keep a hand with Fov, pitch card, Mox + pitch, land and Blue Blast and something else. 

He goes turn 1 Tomb into Painter, names blue and plays Lotus Petal. 

I put him on Red Blast. Definitely.  

I draw a card, play Mox and a land, GO! 

He played Saga and with the trigger on the stack I FoV’d both his Saga and Painter. He used Petal for Red Blast, and I counter his blast with Blue Blast. That resolved and he stayed with only a Tomb in play.  

Mark was out of gas pretty much and I started developing my board with Loam and I believe Exploration. 

By the time he used Surgical in his main phase as his last card, I showed him a winning Crop Rotation for the combo. He still went through my deck, but realized he couldn’t do anything.  

Too bad we got paired! 

Score update: I’m in 8th place with a 5-1-1 record on breakers! Now that’s what I call magic! 

Top 8

I faced off against Alex in the top 8 with Riddlesmith Combo. Alex is an amazing player and (spoiler alert!) would ultimately make it to the finals against Sneak and Show. In this version of RUG Lands I didn’t play Sphere of Resistance which is a bit of a shame against a deck like Riddlesmith. On the play Alex went off turn 2 and then turn 3 on the draw. Game 3 had a Flusterstorm for his Grapeshot on hand but I was tapped out, so there was no chance. I had a Surgical on his Urza’s Saga in game 2 hoping he was on that plan but he wasn’t. I feel like the deck has a weak spot for Surgical on LED and then its second plan is Constructs. I could’ve used some luck there but unfortunately, no such luck! 

I ultimately won some sweet prizes, including a beautiful art piece of Unholy Heat and Eldritch Evolution, a deckbox, and a March of the Machine Set Booster Box. 

Conclusion Dutch Open Series 

I’m satisfied with making it to the top 8. Just barely making it in with one loss and one draw shows how quickly you can fall out. 

I’m glad that the Dutch Open Series is back and hope it continues and grows into a grand tournament that happens throughout the year and connects to local tournaments. That’s good for the Dutch Magic scene and ultimately the Dutch Legacy scene. 

It was really cool to see so many familiar faces and people from Belgium and Germany too. 

The head judge even came up to me during the rounds to say he appreciates how I deal with the judges’ decisions, even if I don’t agree with the ruling or if it turns out badly for me. Awesome compliment! Respect is important and judges and tournament organizers also do it out of love for the game. And the foil judge promos of course. 

Conclusion RUG Lands 

After three top 8 finishes in a month, I can’t say RUG doesn’t work in Lands. I think Otawara is great and Ipnu is a good addition if Doomsday is being played a lot. Further, I think Blue Blast is really good and Flusterstorm/Spell Pierce are more than just ok. Maybe you could swap them for two Spheres instead. But I can also see why you don’t. It also depends on what you expect from the meta and a bit of luck which decks you’re going to face. But with so much Painter, Mono Red and RW or RG initiative I think blue is good. 

Still, I remain a big fan of Choke and I don’t think Choke goes with blue, even if you only run one Trop. 

Three Maze is a bit too much, but in RG it might be ok. It really depends on whether you play with Reclaimer or not. With a resolved Choke, I missed Port. You can wonder if Port isn’t too low power leveled nowadays. 

Soul-Guide Lantern I think is a fantastic card and I didn’t miss Shadowspear, although it’s always nice to have access to that card. 

Next Legacy tournament is May 7^th in Turnhout, Belgium. 

May you all get Brainstorm locked. 

Thanks for reading! 

Bazaar of Boxes tournament – ELM invite

It’s time for the Bazaar of Boxes tournament in Tilburg, Netherlands! Held every three months, this tournament is getting bigger and better each time. The organizers of this tournament love Magic: The Gathering, and especially the Legacy format. They even stream twice a week on Twitch with English Legacy content. And of course, every three months there’s this tournament. The winner gets an invite to the European Legacy Masters in Bologna; an awesome tournament with a super strong field. My goal for this tournament was set: eyes on the prize!

Meta calling and deck choices

I had been playing the blue splash online for the past few weeks, mostly for Flusterstorm. That card far exceeded my expectations. I also tried Slogurk main, but I don’t like that card for competitive play. It has amazing synergies with the deck, but it’s too slow. (Although it can kill out of nowhere!)

I made a meta call that there would be a lot of red decks around, and relatively little combo. So I wanted blue cards like Blue Elemental Blast and Hydroblast, cards that nobody expects from Lands. I also included Flusterstorm to replace Spheres since there wasn’t much combo. I chose Minsc main to do well against the fair decks I expected. To keep my matchups against Delver and Magus of the Moon decks strong, I chose to put 2 Punishing Fire and 2 Lightning Bolt main. That meant moving my 3 Endurances to the sideboard.

Something that immediately stands out is that I played with 71 cards – 10 Attractions (without ‘enablers’) to throw my opponents off. Unfortunately, in the Netherlands, most players know I play Lands.

As a wise man once said in the Lands Discord: “You will waste more mental edge presenting and registering an attraction deck than you will gain from your opponent thinking you have an attraction deck.”

I had the 61st card in my main deck be Field of the Dead. With two Elvish Reclaimers, I didn’t think 61 cards would do too much damage to the deck but I had a silver bullet for grindy, slow games too. With my two Reclaimers I opted to play two Dark Depths. The Reclaimers make my Delver matchup better, they are good in fair matchups, and they are also really strong against certain combo decks like Reanimator and Doomsday due to Ipnu Rivulet. With the absence of Spheres, I chose to play Ipnu Rivulet for Doomsday and since I had Endurance in the sideboard, I chose to main Soul-Guide Lantern instead of Shadowspear. 

Otawara was a card that disappointed in testing, but I did see the power of recurring Otawara with a lot of mana in play and a Loam engine this tournament. 

It’s worth seriously considering not having Spheres in your 75 anymore, unless you’re playing Leagues on MTGO, and especially if you are playing Flusterstorm. RUG Lands is a good, balanced version of the deck with lots of sideboard slots. It has enough GY hate cards, it’s good against fair decks with Minsc and Field and Sagas, it’s good against Delver and against creature decks. It’s relatively weak against spell-based combo decks, but cards like Flusterstorm can be winning there as well. 

Another whole different approach is to just play RG Lands and have higher Stages + Depths count and add in a Sejiri Steppe. Even then, I would play at least two Reclaimers, and Shadowspear instead of Soul-Guide.

Match report

Round 1 – (Atraxa) NO SHOW 2-0

Round one was a breeze and gave me the opportunity to take a stroll and check out what the competition was playing. Exactly what I suspected: a lot of Red, plenty of artifacts, and not many combo decks. I was happy with my Blue Blasts.

Round 2 – PVDH on Esper Control with Attractions 2-0

Round two was against one of the best Dutch Legacy/Magic players, Peter. He’s known as an innovator, and this ‘fun’ control deck with Attractions was something he brought to the table when he made the top 8 in the previous edition of this tournament. It had plenty of value and splashed Red for maindeck Comet Planeswalker and I guess Red Blast in the sideboard.

Game one I won after a mulligan to five with a mediocre hand. I knew I had to go all-in on my Marit Lage plan and he had no answer despite two Ponders and two Brainstorms. He tried to bluff by keeping White open, but I had no choice with zero cards in hand.

Game two was a long one. He had a few creatures on board, including two Deadbeat Attendent and thus two or three Attractions open. He also had Triumph Of Saint Katherine and was at about 35 life.

I bought enough time and eventually had a Thespian’s Stage-Saga-Field of the Dead. Pretty nice; every land drop gave me two zombies, plus a Construct every turn. 

Time was running short and, since I was leading one-zero, I decided to play defensively. I made some sloppy plays near the end, but he couldn’t break through my wall of creatures and I won the match.

Round 3 – UR Delver 2-0

You can watch the game on Twitch here https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1781612222?t=00h15m58s

Despite my name and deck being wrong in the information bar, that was me. 

In Game 1 I played Exploration into Daze, knowing I had another Exploration, Loam, Wasteland and Crop for Tabernacle. The game went exactly as I had hoped and my opponent eventually gave up. In Game 2 I went for the Marit Lage and my opponent seemed flooded. After a Force on my Soul-Guide Lantern, I expected a Murktide and it did indeed came down the following turn. I went all-in on my token and he had no answer.

Round 4 – Painter – 2-0

This match is also on stream and you can watch this match right after the other one. I was playing against Justen, someone I’ve known for a while and is a funny dude. 

In Game 1 I had all the answers, like Pithing Needle for his Grind Stone and Soul-Guide after he put Painter in his graveyard. I also had Wasteland for his Saga and I was able to take the game with the help of my Loam + Exploration engine.

In Game 2 he had a Turn 1 Magus of the Moon. I anticipated this by having a hand with Mox Diamond and Blue Blast. I searched for Dark Depths with Crop and waited until he tapped out. He did and I destroyed his Magus of the Moon. I could have gone for the win earlier, since Painter practically has no answer to Marit Lage, but I took my time and played around Dead/Gone.

Round 5 – Painter 2-0

My opponent here is Maarten, a good Legacy player who ended up winning the tournament. I had advised him to play Painter beforehand since he’s a player who can see all the complex lines of Painter, while his opponents make mistakes. In Game 1 I won with an Otawara-lock. I had Loam + Exploration, enough mana and an Otawara. After a few turns he had seen enough.

In Game 2 Maarten mulled to four or five and again I had all the answers to whatever he did, like Soul-Guide after Painter was in the graveyard, Pithing Needle, Force of Vigor + a green card and a surprisingly fast Marit Lage.

Round 6 + 7: ID

Without losing any games in the Swiss, I could easily ID both rounds and had two spare hours to relax and grab some food and mentally prepare for the top 8.

Top 8

The top 8 had these decks in it:

Infect
Lands
Mono-Blue Painter
Five-Color Zenith
Mono-Red Painter
Doomsday
Boros Initiative
Mississippi River (a cool deck that you can watch on stream a couple of times, but was also weak to a wasteland lock)

I wanted to dodge one deck (Zenith) and especially wanted to avoid Boros Initiative. And that was exactly the deck I had to play against.

I lost both games without a chance, with an early initiative creature and many removal spells. 

It was a shame, because I felt I had a good chance against the rest of the top 8 and would have liked to win the invite to Bologna.

Conclusion

I had a blast! (Nerd humor)

Great tournament, great Legacy scene in the Netherlands and great deck. Enjoyed the blue splash and would recommend. 

Thanks to the organization, especially Rob as the commentator.

Links

https://www.mtgtop8.com/event?e=43132&d=518711&f=LE
https://www.twitch.tv/bazaarofboxes
https://www.youtube.com/@bazaarofboxes
https://twitter.com/bazaarofboxes

Introduction

Five months ago (in September 2022) I had the Legacy format completely figured out. I knew the top decks in the online winner’s meta and I felt comfortable playing vs all of these decks with Lands. I got rewarded by a Top 8 in the online Super Qualifier on  the 3rd of September and I followed this up with a Top 16 in the Showcase Challenge three weeks later. I was not the only one enjoying success with Lands at this time. In fact Lands was the most successful of the “big” decks in the Super Qualifier with a staggering non-mirror winrate of 75% in this event (compare this to UR Delver that had a non-mirror winrate of 47% in the same tournament). There was peace and harmony in the Lands discord but this was about to change. 

It started with Minsc & Boo getting introduced to Magic Online. This gave control decks a real clock vs us and I was worried that this would stop my main plan vs control that is to prolong the game, with Urza’s Saga plus Thespian Stage, to the point where I would either win by damage or by simply stopping my opponent from killing me and then them eventually timing out. It turned out that the impact from Minsc in control did not change the MU dramatically and I still felt OK playing vs these decks. However, Minsc & Boo would have a huge impact on another deck (GW Depths) and this matchup went from bad to horrible. Minsc combined with Wasteland for Karakas was almost impossible to beat. 

But things were about to get worse for us Lands players. Much worse in fact. In November the White Initiative cards were introduced to Magic Online and PVDH won the first challenge where they were legal. I ran into the deck in a few Leagues and it definitely felt like a bad matchup. My initial estimate was that it was something like a 40 / 60 matchup. I managed to win some games by recurring Marit Lage, and other games where they would get mana screwed, but what scared me was that their good hands were much faster than my Urza’s Saga hands. After a few weeks their lists got more tuned and my winrate vs the deck went down. I wish that I would have taken the time to do dedicated testing vs White Initiative at this time but I didn’t. It would have been great to really figure out how the games played out (both pre and post sideboard as well as play / draw). Instead of doing this my brain went into hyper-activity and I started brewing up ideas (most of them really bad) like:

• Old school Lands with Valakut Exploration and Glacial Chasm.
• Ancient Tomb, Fable of the Mirror Breaker and Anarchy.
• Bant Lands with Shark Typhoons and Hall of Heliod’s Generosity.
• Scapeshift Lands.
• Many different Lands variants with creatures with Protection from White.

I lost a lot during this time and I eventually just gave up. If you have read my article on how to compete with the best with Lands you might recall that I said that a version of the Prison-Combo-Control-Ramp Lands shell will always be competitive in Legacy, but in December 2022 I felt that this was no longer true. It was a huge issue for us to have a bad fair matchup. This is because when you play Lands you concede the combo archetype in G1 in order to be favored vs fair decks. No combo deck is usually above 5% of the field and you can build your sideboard to have a good post sideboard matchup vs two out or three combo decks and hope to dodge the rest. But now we had a fair matchup that occupied 20%-25% of the winner’s meta and that required us to dedicate 4-6 sideboard slots to Mesa Pegasus (Unchained Berserker) and narrow board wipes such as Virtue’s Ruin. I started losing more vs the non-Initiative decks and I still lost to the Initiative decks. Games vs Initiative would play out in such a way that we would trade the emblem back and forth and then they would reach the final chapter and have a board of multiple 5/5’s and 6/7’s whereas I would have a board of a single 1/1 with protection from white (often I would not even have this as they would find Walking Ballista and kill my Unchained Berserker). My board wipes wouldn’t really matter as the emblem was still there ticking down towards the ultimate.

In early December I did something that I have not done in over four years. I put my Lands cards on the shelf and decided to learn a new deck. I bought White-Plume Adventurer and Seasoned Dungeoneer, and I even contacted Philip Gallager to get coaching. Initially all went super easy. I won close to 80% of my matches in Leagues and I was really motivated. But I was about to get a reality check. December is the most busy month for a family man like myself as Christmas is around the corner. It’s also the most busy month for a Quant Developer as most software projects have milestones to be delivered before a new year. I did not have time to learn a new deck. I did cancel the coaching session as I felt that I did not have time to do it well. I should also have taken a break from magic but I did not. Instead I jammed Initiative Leagues most evenings / nights and spent my days being tired and irritated. After Christmas I was unhappy and finally decided to take a break from playing Leagues on magic online and told myself to only play Prelims and Showcases. I did horribly with Initiative in a few prelims (2-2, 1-3 and 0-4) and I gave up on the idea of learning the deck. The deck was broken but I would still lose the mirror a lot. I would also lose most non-mirror games where I did not run my opponent over. I felt uncomfortable with making decisions and often thought to myself: “If I had played Lands in this matchup I would know exactly what to do”. 

I simply didn’t have enough time to really master a new deck so I sold my Initiative cards and was back on Lands. I looked at the online winner’s meta and it was interesting for Lands. As of the 31st of January 2023 the decks to beat (>5% of metashare) were UR Delver, White Initiative, Painter and Reanimator. Decks to look out for (>3% of the metashare) were 4C Control, Cephalid Breakfast, Elves and Death Shadow. Spell based combo was almost non-existent and I figured that if I cut all Sphere effects for more graveyard hate I would crush all non-Initiative decks. If I could just find a Lands build that was 50/50 vs White Initiative I would feel comfortable playing Lands.

Legacy winner’s meta from January 2023.

In the last week of January I started playing Leagues again to test some new ideas. My first idea was to main deck Leyline of the Void together with the Helm of Obedience combo. I had noticed (while playing White Initiative) that the deck doesn’t run many answers to enchantments and I hoped that the Helm + Leyline combo would be consistent enough to beat them. It wasn’t. My deck was bad and I would often have to mull very hard just to find a Leyline in the opener. After this I tested Scapeshift Lands again and it was too slow. I finally tested a few variants of Prison Painter / Lands and they felt worse then normal Painter. So came the eureka moment. I felt like Dark Depths was exceptionally well positioned vs the non-initiative decks. Delver in particular felt weak to Depths as they had cut Submerge from their sideboard and some Delver decks even shaved on Wastelands. I remembered that most of my game one wins vs White Initiative was with recurring Marit Lage so maybe I should just focus on this angle and not try to fight over the emblem at all. I added Steely Resolve to the sideboard. I figured that this would blank most of my Initiative opponent’s cards post sideboard and it’s an enchantment so they couldn’t easily remove it. Steely Resolve, Dark Depths and Thespian’s Stage is a three card combo and I did not know if it would be consistent enough. I added Commune with Spirits to increase the consistency. I went 3-1 in a Prelim and I also got a 5-0 in a League with this initial list. During these matches I had faced White Initiative several times and Steely Resolve was great.

My winrate was 50% vs White initiative while testing, and I had achieved my goal, but I wasn’t done yet. I had played two copies of Yavimaya, Cradle of Growth in these lists and I was impressed by it. It would speed up my Dark Depths lines by one turn and it would also make recurring Dark Depths much easier. I remember that the discord user Lavafrogg had been crushing their local meta, just when Urza’s Saga was printed, with a list that had three Yavimaya and three Expedition Maps. I searched in the Lands discord and found their old list for inspiration. I took their list and cut all three drops. Legacy is so fast right now that I did not want to play clunky cards. I also felt like sideboarding vs Delver was awkward as I had too many cards to side in and not that many to side out. I therefore swapped Endurance for Surgical Extraction. Surgical is better against Reanimator as it’s easier to mull for. I got a 5-0 on my first try, and the list felt great, so I registered it for the PTQ (that was the day after). If you want to see my sideboard notes you can go here and if you want to learn more about my general principles for building decks you can read this article or listen to me talk about it on this episode of the Dark Depths podcast.

Tournament Report

Round 1 (2-0 vs DarthStone on Reanimator)

R1G1

I lose the dieroll and keep a hand with two Explorations and five lands (see below). I figure that this hand can either go for a fast Marit Lage or play the long game thanks to Urza’s Saga into Expedition Map into another Saga. My opponent is on Reanimator and goes turn one Grief into Reanimate on Grief (takes both my Explorations). My hand is now pretty slow but my opponent does not have a follow up and Saga finds Soul-Guide Lantern and I also have Maze of Ith for my opponent’s Grief and the game is wrapped up.

.

R1G2

I mull to six and keep a hand with two Life from the Loam, one Surgical and four lands including Bojuka Bog (see below).

I think for a while and decide to bottom Loam instead of Bojuka Bog. My hope is that my opponent will either have an unprotected turn one hand or a “pass the turn” hand. My opponent goes turn one Grief (takes Surgical). I top deck another Surgical and play out Bojuka Bog to exile the Grief in my opponent’s graveyard. My opponent casts Entomb, at the end of my first turn, just to get all their Griselbrand exiled by my top decked Surgical. 

Round 2 (2-0 vs Runkor on Elves)

R2G1

I win the dieroll and mull my first two hands that are slow and clunky. I finally keep a hand with Mox Diamond and six lands (see below).

I put Bojuka Bog and Blast Zone on the bottom, and I start with Urza’s Saga and pass. I want to get to three counters quickly to find an Expedition Map for Thespian’s Stage. My opponent goes Forest into Elvish Reclaimer. I draw Exploration and this allows me to play out Mox Diamond (pitching Wasteland), Yavimaya and Dark Depths. On the following turn I can search for an Expedition Map, activate it to find Stage and also activate Stage to summon Marit Lage. Runkor does not play main deck Karakas and they concede. 

R2G2

I mulligan to six and keep a hand that is very similar to the one in G1 (see below). It has Thespian’s Stage and Urza’s Saga to find Dark Depths. 

I put Yavimaya on the bottom (in hindsight I should probably have put Mox Diamond on the bottom). My opponent goes fetchland pass and I smell Force of Vigor. I draw Forest and go Forest, Exploration, Taiga (not Saga to play around Force of Vigor). Runkor plays Collector’s Ouphe on their second turn and I bolt it. I draw Crop Rotation but since I have Urza’s Saga I don’t make Marit Lage instantly (playing around Karakas). The game goes on for a few turns but eventually my opponent taps out for Natural Order and I can make Marit Lage in response and win.

Round 3 (2-0 vs tarte on Death Shadow)

R3G1

I win the dieroll and have a hand that is very strong vs Death Shadow / Delver (that I suspect my opponent is on). It has acceleration and Tabernacle and Maze and access to the Marit Lage combo (see below).

I start with Mox Diamond (pitch Tabernacle), Urza’s Saga and Expedition Map (gets countered by Force of Will). My opponent goes Watery Grave into Ponder. I draw Life from the Loam and cast it (this hits a Daze). Next turn I dredge Loam and find Mox Diamond with Saga’s third chapter and Loam back three lands. At this stage I am too far ahead onboard (two lands and two Moxes vs my opponent’s one land). The game drags on for a few turns but it’s effectively over.

R3G2

I keep a hand with acceleration and access to Marit Lage if I can get a Crop Rotation to resolve (see below).

I choose to play it out so that I can make a Marit Lage on my opponent’s second upkeep (to play around Force of Negation on Crop Rotation). This resolves and my opponent then casts Baleful Strix. I now have two lands in play and Shadowspear in hand. If I can only top deck a land I will win on the following turn. I brick on that but instead draw Crop Rotation and win thanks to Sejiri Steppe. 

Round 4 (2-1 vs sandydogmtg on White Initiative)

I reinstalled Magic Online on my computer and lost all replays so the notes from Round 4 onwards will be much more sparse and based on memory. I apologize for this.

R4G1

My opponent has a turn one Elite Spellbinder with City of Traitors and Lotus Petal. They take my Exploration. I go Tabernacle pass and the game drags on for a few turns with my opponent tapping their City in upkeep and not playing more lands. I deploy Maze of Ith and other utility lands and I eventually find Yavimaya to cast Exploration from exile. This really unlocks my hand and I can start recurring Marit Lage every turn until I win. 

R4G2

My opponent has a fast hand with multiple initiative creatures and I die before I can assemble the three turn combo of Stage, Dark Depths and Steely Resolve. 

R4G3

I have the absolute nut hand of Mox Diamond, Yavimaya, Dark Depths, Steely Resolve and Crop Rotation (and another land to pitch to Mox). This is a turn two 20/20 with shroud and this is enough to win.

Round 5 (2-1 vs Martin_Dominguez on UR Delver)

R5G1

It’s a normal Lands vs Delver game where I pretend to try and deny my opponent mana but in reality I just play for a turn three Marit Lage.

R5G2

I believe I mull to five and keep a hand that can potentially make a semi-fast Marit Lage. I end up not getting there as I draw two Steely Resolves and three Mox Diamonds. 

R5G3

I win with a fast Marit Lage.

Round 6 (2-0 vs RogeDeckWins on White Initiative)

I don’t remember much of these games except my opponent kept slower hands with lots of removal. I won game one by recurring Marit Lage and in game two Steely Resolve blanked their entire hand. Look at the screenshot below. My opponent has Karakas in play and they have chosen to imprint both Solitude and Swords to Plowshares to Chrome Mox (as they were effectively dead cards).

Round 7 (1-2 vs HankTheObese on White Initiative)

They play a slightly different build than the stock version with Chancellor of the Annex and three copies of March of the Otherwordly Light. This version seems better vs my Steely Resolve tech.

R7G1

I can’t manage to get Marit Lage going and lose to Initiative Creatures.

R7G2

I have Exploration and Life from the Loam and the combo. I make Marit Lage at least seven or eight times before one of them finally sticks. I eventually win the game with 80 life or something similar. I guess it’s not the first Marit Lage that kills you. It’s the ninth…

R7G3

This game is interesting. I mulligan and make a pretty big mistake (playing out Mox Diamond early even though I can’t use the mana). My opponent casts March on my Mox Diamond hoping to mana screw me. I instantly draw another Mox and cast Steely Resolve. My opponent gets going with Seasoned Dungeoneer and I end up losing a turn before I can kill them. 

Round 8 (1-2 vs AlessioC on Cephalid Breakfast)

R8G1

I have a slow hand that can’t manage to control their mana. They eventually combo kill me through my light disruption. 

R8G2

I have a good hand with Urza’s Saga and mana denial. I manage to attack with constructs while I build up layers of defense with Soul-Guide Lantern and removal etc. 

R8G3

I keep a hand with Life from the Loam and two Mox Diamonds but only one land (Urza’s Saga). I also have some disruption in Pyroblast and Surgical Extraction. I figure that if I draw a land on my first turn then my hand is absolute nuts, and if I draw a land in any of my first two turns then my hand is still good. I end up not drawing a land before turn six or seven and fall too far behind and lose. 

Quarter Finals (0-2 vs AlessioC on Cephalid Breakfast)

R8G1

I can’t remember but I believe I lost to a fast combo. 

R8G2

My head is completely wiped here after a long evening. It’s been awhile since I did well online and my head is not used to these long runs. At some point I even consider casting Crop Rotation for Dark Depths into open white mana just to get the game over (I end up not doing that and go for the long game). This game is a bit similar to our first game as I’m not able to control their mana again and they put pressure on my disruption with Stoneforge Mystic into Kaldra Compleat. I have to use Map for Maze in order to not die and I eventually lose to their combo when I am tapped out. 

What’s next?

I was absolutely ecstatic after this Top 8 performance. So many people have told me that Lands is a dead deck and I had even given up myself for a short while. But we have shown once more that the Combo-Control-Prison-Ramp strategy can always be viable in Legacy. This time an Ancient Tomb deck is the best thing to be doing and it turns out that we should really push the Combo angle to attack it. I have tried to take this idea even further and I went 4-0 in a Prelim with my own take on RG Combo Lands. In this deck I have increased the speed even more by adding two Manabonds to the main.  In order to maximize the explosiveness of Manabond I also swapped the Saga package (and Urza’s Saga) for Gamble to virtually increase my copies of Life from the Loam. 

Still, it’s a fair question to ask if our good position in the meta is sustainable going forward. Steely Resolve is somewhat of a cheese strategy vs White Initiative and it can get worse if they start to play enchantment removal or if they adjust their play pattern and mulligan the slower hands with a ton of removal. But so far they have not done this and I am pretty happy playing against White Initiative. There is a Legacy Showcase Challenge at the end of this month and my plan is to get some reps in vs Cephalid Breakfast to give myself the best chances in this tournament. I really look forward to it!

Overall, I feel that my current build of Lands has no bad matchups among the top decks in Legacy. This is exactly where I want to be as I can utilize my experience and matchup training to get an edge over my opponents. I am not the only one doing well with Lands at the moment. Magic online user and streamer PunishingWaterfalls recently made Top 16 of a Challenge with my list from the PTQ and they have also done well with 8 Mulch. My latest iteration of Grandpa Lands has 2 Manabonds and I feel like it might be a good idea to merge the Lands and 8 Mulch shells into something of a middle ground.

Thanks for reading. 

Part 1: The List

The state of Arizona is blessed with a reasonably-functional Legacy tournament scene.  A series of qualifiers feeds (both in money and participants) a 16-person end-of-the-year tournament.  I had qualified in October by winning an event with RG Combo Lands (4 Depths / 1 Saga, report here). The next month I won a similar event playing RUG Saga lands (No formal report.  Deck was a big mess of stuff I wanted to try – the 3-color manabase starts “working” [big quotes] if you cut Grove, and that Ghost Quarter really impressed). So I was going into the December masters event with two consecutive wins in my proverbial cap. The plan was to play a 4 Depths / 4 Endurance RUG list that used Flusterstorms to protect Marit Lage and resolve Minsc and Boo.

Then everything changed when White Plume Adventurer was added to Magic Online. 

The Initiative matchup for traditional Lands builds turns out to be truly dreadful.  Your removal is quickly outscaled, the deck plays 12ish natural answers to Marit Lage, flying blockers, and quickly bursts through +20 life.  Insert the last report’s diatribe about Saga here.  Add in a manabase with several basics and the life loss from Trap! going through Glacial Chasm, game 1 was feeling pretty much impossible against any player that knew how to mulligan aggressively enough.  The sideboard didn’t offer a lot of help, since they were already adapting to pro-red creatures (trading the Initiative isn’t even good for Lands – we don’t apply enough pressure to stop them from crushing any reasonable race), and so-called hammers like Torpor Orb or Anarchy were too slow and unreliable (not to mention the bad position of giving up game 1 and trying to win a second sideboard game on the draw).

With a sub-30% matchup against the “best deck” and rumors that fast combo was the next level to beat it, I was ready to give up Exploration and got as far as checking if any local shops had Cephalid Illusionists in-stock when I saw an Eternal Weekend report from discord user amalek0.  They played an exciting 8-Mulch variant that preached the power of Ghost Wuarter and streamlined deck construction.  All credit for the list goes to them – read their report for more insight.

Amalek’s list gave the Mulch deck a dimension I think it had lacked previously – Ghost Quarter denying opponents the safety of basics and leaving them hopelessly exposed to the Tabernacle.  Combined with the speed of Manabond, we can present our own subgame that invalidated the massive card advantage of the initiative mechanic.  Instead of fighting them on their axis with creature combat, we brought them to our home turf – the battle for lands as a resource.

Cut your Mox Diamonds.  

Put your lands into play instead of the graveyard.  

Cut every maindeck card that doesn’t say “land” in its oracle text.

Cast your body into a woodchipper.

This is how I learned to stop worrying and love the Mulch. 

Starting with Amalek’s list, I did what I do with almost any Lands list and added two untapped green sources.  Probably still want ~1 more (cutting stage?).  The deck already mulligans extremely hard, and I wanted to reduce unkeepable hands as much as possible.  I considered cutting the 2nd Boseiju for a pathway but didn’t. Boseiju was really good so I’m glad I didn’t.  

I wasn’t sure about the Hall package, and am really skeptical having time to cast Stoney Silence in any matchup where it matters, but decided to trust the person who actually tested and left it in.  I used Hall once all day in a game I had already won, but can see the appeal.  

The deck is clean dead to Storm or Omni, which I didn’t expect any of, and also Cephalids, which I was worried other people might pick up after some breakout performances. Sometimes you just have to read a metagame and commit.

I fired off one modo league, going 3-2 with both losses to initiative.  But unlike previously, I felt like there was a plan. 

Part 2: The Event

The day before the tournament was also my first day off work for the end of the year.  I prepared by baking way too many cookies which I drove around delivering to people.  Amalek has written a tournament report but it hadn’t been posted yet so I’m hoping to have the element of surprise. I try to get a bit of dex practice flipping cards for Mulch.  Apparently not enough since I end up calling a judge on myself twice flipping additional cards. 

The morning of the tournament I wake up tired, make some eggs, and pet the cat. I put a gallon of pastries from yesterday into the car and flip through the PUP discography on the drive up.  I switch to Squid once I get to Phoenix and manage to not drive my car into a wall while drumming along to GSK. 

The tournament format is roughly as follows – everyone is divided into two pods, first two rounds are against your pod, subsequent rounds against the other pod.  Everyone plays until they are either 4-0 (immediately making top 8 and getting play/draw option) or takes 3 losses (eliminated).  Other than 4-0 players, play/draw in top 8 is determined by die roll.  I like this format because it eliminates the scourge of intentional draws and places everything in your luck at winning games of magic.

R1 v Food Chain Goblins (WLW)

Round 1 I sit down against one of two Goblins players at the event.  This matchup is reasonably good but has gotten a lot harder with the innovation of the Food Chain combo making them faster and less dependent on the combat step.  Also I’m playing zero removal spells.

Game 1: I have a fast Exploration hand with Loam, waste them a few times and Boseiju the Food Chain.  My opponent has mountain forest in play when I draw Ghost Quarter and enter one of my favorite parts of paper magic by asking them how many basics Food Chain Goblins plays. It’s always nice to ask first, but they hedge around saying “oh a few.”  I play my Ghost Quarter, hit their Mountain and ask them to show me. They would rather scoop.

Sideboard: – Karakas, Bog, 2 Winding Way; + Drop, 3 Force

Game 2: I have another solid hand but get greedy Mulching and don’t hold up Boseiju for a turn which allows them to combo kill me. They almost whiff with some exceptionally poor Muxus flips and reveal that they brought in both Leylines and Magus of the Moon (which I am 100% stone dead to), but eventually get enough nonsense in play with Conspicuous Snoop to one-shot me.  In retrospect they had telegraphed the combo pretty hard by matroning for Matron the turn before so I should have known to play around it. 

Game 3: I make 14 zombies on turn 2 and murder them. 

Opponent Basic Count: 2

Record: 1-0

R2 v White Initiative (WLL)

Round 2 I play against the same opponent from round 2 of my last report, who I also played in round 3 of the last event. Both times they were on blue artifacts and I beat them cleanly.  This time I saw in round 1 that they had switched to White Initiative.  I lose the die roll which shaves probably 30% off my chances for the match.

Game 1: They don’t appear to have mulliganed enough so when I answer their “Cavern, pass” start with “Exploration, Waste” I establish “tempo” and they never recover, scooping to Ghost Quarter lock

Sideboard:  – Karakas, Bog, Depths, Stage; + Drop, Maze, 2 Force

Amalek takes in Stoney Silence but I think it’s too hard to cast for the impact level and Force is really important to answer Chalice on 1 and 2.  Think it’s possible you want all 3 Forces on the draw since t1 Chalice usually ends the game.  Eventually Boseiju or Force can answer Chrome Mox to complete the lock.

Game 2:  They keep a better hand with turn 1 Archon which obliterates my development.  A few turns later Anointed Peacekeeper on Maze of Ith shuts me down and I die without putting up any serious opposition

Game 3: I keep the nuts on 7 with t1 Manabond into double Mulch, but after resolving both Mulches I still can’t trigger my Field of the Dead with a 6-land hand of only Maze, Wastelands, Ghost quarter and Field of the Dead. I finally get the 7th name a few turns later and make 14 zombies but a timely Seasoned Dungeoneer ends the game. 

Opponent Basic Count: 3

Record: 1-1

I’m a bit frustrated with the loss so I go to my car and get my giant tupperware of baklava et al and start trying to feed the poor souls in the standard RCQ that’s sharing the same store.  They have less players than the 16-cap legacy event. 

R3 v Jeskai Cards (LWL)

I sit down for round three against an opponent I haven’t met but saw winning round 1 against Doomsday with a hand of cards that looked like Iteration Jeskai. 

Game 1: I keep a really speculative 6 with Field, 3 other colorless lands, and two Mulches.  Really indefensible keep that I justify by thinking Jeskai takes years to kill and guaranteeing my Field is in play matters. The biggest thing to learn with this deck is that with so few green sources and so many draw-threes you really want to mull to hands that are guaranteed functional. My opponent reveals themselves to not be on the stock list by curving Fable into Mentor and I die when my first spell – a hail-mary Crop for Yavimaya on turn 6 – is Forced.

Sideboard: – Karakas, Bog, Depths, Tabernacle, Maze; + Surgical, 2 Choke, 2 Force 

I think this is the wrong sideboard plan and I should have shaved at least one Crop and skipped the Forces.

Game 2: I make 12 zombies on turn 2, Quarter their plains and murder them.

Game 3: My hand is fine but they curve Ashiok into Ruinition and I am ruined. 

Opponent Basic Count: Too Many

Record: 1-2

I see both Doomsday players leaving the building so I’m at least safe from that.  The only players I don’t want to be matched with at this point are the one Balustrade Spy gamer and my Reanimator opponent from the semis of October’s report, who has switched to some sort of knight /green sun pile. I think the mulches really help that matchup but he’s played a lot of unique tech in the past and I don’t want to have to find out about it in medias res.

R4 Delver (WW)

Now facing elimination (reminder that the tournament format is play-to-3-losses), I’m paired against the Delver player from top 8 of the last report.  I had also defeated them in the semis of last month’s event so we’d joked about meeting in finals this time. Neither of us are so lucky. The last two matches were very long three-game sets in which I played a very controlling blasts-and-endurance configuration postboard, so I’m hoping I can juke them with my new all-prison approach to the matchup. 

Game 1: Manabond resolves and my Loam flips Ghost Quarter and they scoop rapidly to my new all-prison approach to the matchup. 

Sideboard: – Karakas, Depths, Stage, Brushland; + Drop, Maze, 2 Choke

Game 2: They reveal Price of Progress with Delver when I’m at 12 so I have to play very slow until I can find a window to wipe them off red.  They have Hearse which slows me down for a bit while Maze holds off the Delver. Eventually I Boseiju the Hearse but lose my Loam to a Force of Negation which opens me up to resolve Choke. I have three Crop Rotations but not enough mana to feel confident rotating without risking losing the Maze that is keeping me out of Price range.  Eventually I think they get antsy and tap out for a Borrower eot which allows me to Crop twice to get through their Force and get the Tabernacle on the field for a concession. 

Opponent Basic Count: Just One

Record: 2-2

R5 4-Color Control (WW)

This round decides who makes top 8.  The lone 4-0 is Goblins expert Dan Ford, also on Food Chain, who has beaten Initiative 3 times already today. I watched him trigger Forge targeting a Fury.  Maybe people should check out this Goblins deck.  My opponent is on 4-Color Control, a matchup I’m usually very worried about.  I think their Loam is better and easier to protect than ours, Uro gives them an Exploration effect that is also a win condition, and they eventually Waste-lock us.  Thankfully, this is another matchup where playing Mulches greatly improves things.

Game 1: I Manabond in 2 Wastes and a Ghost Quarter discarding Loam on the first turn and my opponent concedes.  Easy.

Sideboard: – Depths, Tabernacle, Maze; +2 Choke, 1 Surgical

Game 2: My Exploration gets Forced but my opponent naturally draws and plays their Island so we enter like 20 turns of the Ghost Quarter lock. I have Boseijus to break their Fetches and am keeping them off two lands.  My Loam gets surgicalled so I have to rely on Stage copies of Ghost Quarter to keep it up. They’re missing land drops without the ability to cantrip as I slowly build up to trigger Field of the Dead without any enchantments. I draw my Surgical to take their Wastelands revealing a hand of Force/Iteration/Uro/Loam/Brainstorm and a huge amount of Saga hate in the deck – once again getting equity from surprise factor.  When they scoop to my naturally-drawn Bog wiping half their deck, I have two Chokes in hand vs their zero lands. 

We’re on to top8.

Opponent Basic Count: One

Record: 3-2

Quarters v Elves WLW 

Top 8 is myself, Dan Ford on Goblins, my Jeskai opponent from round 3 (also playing White Plume Adventurer), four copies of mono-W Initiative, and my opponent, known Lands player Anthony Rivera, on combo Elves.

He won last year’s event on his clever saga Lands build with 3 Expedition Maps (report here ) but had been playing around with Elves lately. When we talked earlier in the event he said he’d thought about bringing his old Lands deck and decided against it because the Initiative matchup looked “tricky”.  This was a good decision. I’m a little worried because I hadn’t really thought about my Elves plan – the Mulches make the deck worse compared to a Depths-heavy build with removal. 

Game 1: I win the die roll and keep a skeptical 7 with Yavimaya/Tabernacle/Crop/Depths. The plan works and turn 2 Tab into turn 3 token is good enough. 

Sideboard: – Karakas, Bog; + Chasm, Drop 

Game 2: I keep a Manabond hand but their start is fast enough I have to Manabond before I can make zombies.  I eventually get Field online and have forty-some power that holds the elves at bay for a few turns (I think me bluffing +3 zombies with an uncracked fetch that had zero remaining targets saves me here), we futz around a bit more, they say “like 5” when I ask how many basics they have (in retrospect I think the number is likely much lower), then I die to double Craterhoof. 

Game 3: I foolishly keep the same hand as game 1 without the Tabernacle. On 7 this was a clear mull but I think I’m overcompensating for my worries about assembling a win with a 2/3 combo setup instead of my usual 4/4. I have two Crops so I rationalize by saying I can get the Tabernacle or Chasm if needed.  On turn 2 I should have rotated for the Tabernacle then used the 2nd Crop to combo after they tapped out on turn 3, replicating game 1. Instead I just pass on turns 2 and 3 and let them get 5 or 6 creatures in play, with my combo face up on the field.  

My opponent tells me he has Natural Order + Boseiju.  They then enter the tank.  

I don’t remember the exact configuration of the board but he’s convinced that he can’t keep enough attackers for hoof to be lethal WHILE holding up Boseiju due most of his mana being stuck in one phase with Gaea’s Cradle. It is to my obvious benefit for this to be the case, and I refuse to do math of any kind, but a watching player with elves experience insists afterward I was dead. My opponent tanks for around twenty minutes (which I do not recommend actually letting your opponent do) and decides to play around two Crop Rotations and Glacial Chasm (which I in fact have) by swinging with some dorks and passing. I untap, Ghost Quarter their Cradle, and do what I should have done two turns ago by rotating for Tabernacle. They Boseiju my Tabernacle, then flash in Endurance targeting me. I show them how skilled I am by using my second Crop Rotation to spin the Tabernacle back into play, and they scoop to the combo a few turns later. 

We’re both convinced he didn’t have the mana to kill me that turn but I still think forcing me to enter the Chasm would have been better, since I would have had to sacrifice both combo pieces to do it.  Magic is hard and I am lucky. 

Opponent Basic Count: “Like Five”

Record: 4-2

Semis v Initiative (WW)

Top four is me, 2x Initiative and Goblins, who has just defeated his fourth consecutive Initiative player.  As I sit down my Initiative opponent’s friend (who also made top 8 with the deck) begs me to finish him off so they can go home.  I win the die roll and tell them I’ll try my best. 

Game 1: I’m pretty sure the texture of this matchup is mostly decided by the die roll and how aggressively both players are willing to mulligan.  I’m willing to put my tournament on the line for this by shipping any game 1 hand without green source + Manabond. This heuristic gets me to four cards, but they’re all I need – Forest, Manabond, Wasteland, Mulch. My first mulch is gas and I draw a second one on turn 3 that flips Loam and they concede as the zombies start rolling in. My opponent had turn 1 White Plume and it didn’t seem close. 

Sideboard same as last

Game 2: We play a bit of back-and-forth with Maze and Tabernacle v their Peacekeepers and fliers when I draw a Ghost Quarter. They have two Plains in play and are about to get a third from re-entering the undercity so I decided to deny them card advantage by Ghost Quartering preemptively.  My opponent puts their Plains into the graveyard and starts untapping their other lands. I quickly stop them and try to explain how Ghost Quarter works.  They look at me and say “oh yeah I cut the third Plains for another Eiganjo, fail to find.” Next turn I Loam back the Ghost Quarter and they concede.

Opponent Basic Count: TWO????

Record: 5-2

We’re done pretty quick so I watch the end of the other semifinals – Goblins v the Initiative player I lost to in round 2. Goblins resolves Virtue’s Ruin but can’t secure five consecutive wins against initiative, so it’s a rematch in finals.

Finals v Initiative (WLW)

I lose the die roll which bodes poorly.  Thankfully based on our last game I’m pretty sure my opponent has Swords over Chalice main, which really lessens the play/draw disparity.  Dan comments on how after reading my rant about Saga v Depths against combo decks in the last report he was pretty sure I’d play Mulch at this event.  Always nice to hear from a fan – and an impressive, if retroactively coherent, read.  

Game 1: My opponent goes to 5, while I keep my first good 7 of the event – Fetch, Tabernacle, Waste, Stage, Manabond, Mulch, Loam.  

They lead on Petal, Tomb, Spellbinder, and tank for a surprising amount of time before taking my Manabond.  They question if Mulch was the right choice.  I’m pretty tired so I just sort of wave them off but in retrospect that would have given me access to a special zone just to avoid discarding my Mulch to Manabond which would have been really good for me.

I go Tabernacle pass which locks them for a few turns until I find a Maze to stabilize and run them out of mana sources.   

Sideboard same as previous

Game 2: I keep a fine Manabond hand but they have turn 1 Chalice on 1 and I’m locked out.  White people beat me down until I find a Boseiju but I can’t figure out a line to survive even breaking the Chalice.  If I had Chasm in the deck I could have deployed multiple enchantments then used Rotation to enter the Chasm which might have given me time to build to Field but I think that’s narrow to want over anything else in the deck on the play.  It’s very possible Chasm ends up being worth it on the draw with more practice.

Game 3: On the play again – I keep a solid Manabond hand that gets answered by turn 1 Lorin.  I play my second Manabond, pray they don’t have Karakas, untap, cast Mulch and they scoop a few turns later when I Loam back my Ghost Quarter.  Exactly how we drew it up.

Opponent Basic Count: Overall Not Enough

Record: Champion

Hat Trick: Secured.  

Thanks for reading.  Check out Porridge Radio.  Register Ghost Quarter.

INTRODUCTION

Greetings fellow Lands aficionados! My name is Michael Warme, and I’ve been slinging Lands since Life from the Loam was a standard-legal card. Many of you might recognize me by my tag for all things magic, amalek0, from either various discords, the MTG Salvation days, or The Source. I’m writing this because I made a meta call the day 2022 Eternal Weekend was announced to play a white-splash build of 8-mulch in the main event. Last weekend, I carried the Lands torch to 38th place at EW with what is, as far as I can find, a unique version of Lands and one which I feel is particularly suited to the current metagame. I suspect this will be the second most widely-read tournament report from my carpool up to EW, as my good friend and only passenger Jay decided to keep me trapped in Philly for as long as humanly possible by taking down the whole thing.

First off, the list:

There’s a couple of things that led me to start messing around with 8-Mulch back in August. For starters, manabases in Legacy have been getting incredibly greedy; Delver plays a singular basic, and many fair piles are also playing only one or two basics. While traditional Lands builds are generally well positioned to disrupt those manabases in a long game, Delver has pushed everything into building and mulliganing towards explosive plays early in the game (e.g. Minsc and Boo). The corresponding options for Lands are to reorient toward a combo build in the classic RG Gamble build sense, play more explosive early permanents ourselves (Minsc and Boo, Sylvan Library, or even some innovative builds with mainboard Spheres), or to play more Manabond copies to increase our turn one hands that really accelerate on-board advantage. Unfortunately, these options have some significant corresponding problems; the RG Gamble builds have been overcome by the long-term trends of the format (increased answers to an early Marit Lage). The builds with more explosive permanents are kind of the next obvious step, fighting fire with fire. I don’t think that’s always a bad thing, but in the current metagame that’s largely a concession to just be a worse version of the 4c control decks. More on this later. Finally, Lands just can’t max out on more manabonds. There’s a limit to how many accelerants you can play without compromising the core structure of the deck, and Exploration + Manabond + Mox Diamond is too many slots to maintain a cohesive deck resembling anything like current Lands gameplans (I’m not a Depths player, but I imagine a Manabond + Mox Diamond flavor of Turbo Depths might be similarly viable).

When I started looking for compromises to mitigate one of those problems, I basically found two options, like the rest of the community: play a multicolor Lands build to add necessary protection and interaction spells to go with the “big” spells/tools, or play the newfangled turbo Field of the Dead build with 8 copies of Mulch. Significantly, I don’t think anyone has cracked the code for a return to the Gamble builds of years past; that metagame space is probably the exclusive domain of Turbo Depths at this point. Unlike most of the community, I think that coming in from a couple years of life obligations crowding out my legacy-playing time helped me approach 8-Mulch with a little more of an open mind.

Returning to the multi-color Lands builds and their “big” permanents, I found they seemed to fall into two categories: those built around 3-4 copies of Urza’s Saga with multiple tutor targets, and those built around mainboarded Minsc and Boo, Endurance, and/or Sylvan Libraries. It didn’t take me very long to realize that the Saga-heavy builds are just a trap–the number of slots required just torpedos the core of the deck, and the repeated trading off of land drops for tutored artifacts works against all the fundamental strategic tools in the Lands arsenal; I think such builds are better off just trying to be a depths deck with Sagas. The more color intensive “big spells” variants of Lands, on the other hand, were a bit more intriguing. Ultimately though, they all seemed to suffer from the same problem as the Saga builds–instead of extra slots taken up by 0/1 mana artifacts, they were instead chock full of 3-4 dual lands, spells that didn’t interact with the graveyard or accelerate land drops, and a sideboard full of generic 1 for 1’s that didn’t exploit the asymmetric advantage of actually putting more lands into play than the opponent.

I was kind of at a loss and flirting with the Wafo-Tapa builds of Jeskai Control (which would have been disastrously bad with the rise of initiative) when I saw someone post a list with a league result of a mono-green 8-Mulch build. I unfortunately don’t have the exact list or remember who to credit, but whoever it was stripped out all the extra techy stuff in the existing 8-Mulch builds and tried a fairly honest all-in build on Mulch and Field. The deck and the league report hinted at the absolutely explosive turn twos available to the deck (turn one Manabond into turn two Mulch for four lands, trigger Manabond with a triple-Field seven card dump for 21 zombies on turn 2), but the brave soul who tried it struggled against some classic favorable matchups and the list I think went too far to maximizing Field and gave up too much of the disruption and leverage available to Lands. It was enough for me to start messing around with it and seeing what I could do to improve the shell.

It was around this time that I started jamming a lot of Lands games against Jay Wojciechowski’s Delver between rounds at weekend events at our LGS (Games and Comics Pair ‘o’ Dice in Fairfax, VA–some of you might have heard of our sponsored team crushing it at the Oko-Toberfest CEDH event a month or two ago, or from the buzz about our weekly old school gatherings every Sunday morning). Jay was talking to me about how tight the mana is in almost every matchup and how it contributed to how high he was on mainboard Brazen Borrowers, and it made me realize that most of the decks in the format really were tied tightly to their curves and were perhaps more susceptible to repeated Wasteland effects than was usual for the format. I immediately adjusted up to trim my Rishadan Ports for two more Ghost Quarters, to see how it felt. It took a week or two for me to realize that while the traditional Lands build was still rough against a lot of the meta, that 4 Wasteland + 3 Ghost Quarter package was a pretty incredible weapon against the format as a whole.

Armed with that knowledge, and having recently seen some of the 8-Mulch experiments, I set about acquiring the random old commons and getting a serious feel for the deck. I knew I wanted that 7 Strip Mine package, but I hadn’t played with more than a single Maze of Ith in years and I was completely unversed in all of the nuances of sideboarding in 8-Mulch. I started my testing (mostly against Jay on Delver, but with some marathon sessions against D&T and midrange Jeskai piles of various flavors) and started quickly iterating on the deck. Ultimately, I didn’t stray too far from established builds of Mulch in mainboard structure, but by streamlining down the colors I freed up more space for the utility and heavy mana disruption packages, which gave me the opportunity to give the deck an angle of attack that most published builds of 8-Mulch lack, or are significantly less likely to assemble.

DECK BREAKDOWN

Let’s talk about the mainboard:

4 Exploration
4 Manabond
4 Crop Rotation

These are sort of the core of the deck, and in my opinion define what is really different between Lands and 8-Mulch. Lands plays Mox Diamond and can do fancy two mana plays on turn one. 8 Mulch does not, and so is very much a Force-check/Daze-check deck in a way that probably feels anathema to most Lands players. Getting comfortable throwing my accelerant into a Daze on turn one took a while to get used to, but it really is absolutely correct. If a hand doesn’t have one of these accelerants or multiple Crop Rotations in game one, I’m very unlikely to keep it. I routinely go to five looking for something potentially explosive with these spells.

4 Mulch
4 Winding Way
4 Life from the Loam

If the enchantments and Crop Rotations are the gas, these spells are the engine. The core strength of 8-Mulch is twofold: it can generate significantly more lands in play than the opponent (often more lands in play than the opponent has total cards available), and it can power this engine without having to rely entirely on Life from the Loam/the graveyard. As we’ll see later, while I played three utility lands that protect Loam from surgical, I am largely willing to toss my Loam into an expected surgical as long as I’m going to get a solid 4 for 1 out of the deal.

4 Wasteland
3 Ghost Quarter

I’ve said a lot about this already, but I think that the mana disruption here is really key against most of the format at the moment, and it’s augmented by access to Boseiju for even more Ghost Quarter-esque effects.

3 Thespian’s Stage
3 Field of the Dead
2 Dark Depths

This is the package of ways available to kill the opponent, and I think three is the minimum for Stage and the absolute number for Field. I can absolutely see Depths and Stage going as high as 4 copies apiece; I think it all depends on what happens with initiative.

1 Windswept Heath
1 Wooded Foothills
1 Verdant Catacombs
1 Forest
1 Snow-Covered Forest
1 Savannah
1 Horizon Canopy
2 Yavimaya, Cradle of Growth
2 Boseiju, Who Endures

I consider this to be the package of green sources (11) and as you can see, there’s a lot of utility crammed in here. Part of the benefit for cutting all the splashes is that these utility effects can cover my color needs, without also requiring another fetch and 1-3 other dual lands.

3 Maze of Ith
1 The Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale
1 Tranquil Thicket
1 Scattered Groves
1 Bojuka Bog
1 Tower of the Magistrate
1 Karakas
1 Hall of Heliod’s Generosity

Most of this is familiar utility to Lands players of all stripes; I think that we really only need to talk about three of them. Scattered Groves is really a fetchable cycler; my most common use case was fetching it, Ghost Wuartering it into a forest, and Loaming it back to set up a double Loam turn to just power the game completely out of reach. Tower of the Magistrate is a specific hedge against Kaldra Compleat. I intentionally chose to play it over the 4th Maze or Glacial Chasm because the decks with access to basics, Stoneforge for Kaldra, and Wasteland can basically just “get us” about 25% of the time by having the Stoneforge and drawing the Wasteland to open a hole in our Maze of Iths for a turn or two. Our spells usually resolve in such matchups so I’m unafraid to aggressively rotate into the Tower and then take some damage as I build up to cover the rest of their board. Finally, Hall of Heliod’s Generosity was really the final addition to bring the deck together. There are a lot of matchups where you can stay at parity for a really long time by loaming back and playing one land per turn to keep creatures covered and pressure on the mana, but it can often be nearly impossible to do that while also setting up to win the game. Hall solves that problem cleanly–at some point, your grind flips into the Hall, and you can pick it up and take exactly one turn off to set up the accelerant enchantment that locks the game away. This was often the flaw with my traditional Lands builds–I would have one Exploration or Manabond get answered, and I would have a game slip away while I treaded water desperately for a few turns trying to find another one. The other thing it does is enable aggressive Force-checking with your Manabonds and Explorations–you’re often able to aggressively draw out two Forces on turns one and two, and then the opponent is essentially out of gas and the Loams/Mulches resolve uncontested while you find the Hall to re-cast the third (or fourth or fifth) accelerant of the game. Finally, it really powers up sideboard games–Choke and Drop of Honey are far more powerful when you can loam into them, and then cast them every turn until they stick.

My sideboard, on the other hand, is a good bit different from the usual mix of Lands and 8-Mulch sideboards:

4 Force of Vigor
4 Endurance
2 Choke
2 Stony Silence
1 Drop of Honey
1 Glacial Chasm
1 Maze of Ith

Most of these cards are not unusual to see in a Lands or depths sideboard (except maybe Stony Silence), but I think the mix says a lot about where this deck sits in relation to other builds of Lands at the moment. The Chokes and Drop of Honey/Endurances speak to the more traditional Lands gameplan of running out the opponent’s mana base with Tabernacle and Wastelands, stressing their fundamental resources. On the other hand, the explosiveness of the deck demands the heavy suite of Forces and high impact utility lands that would just be mainboarded in traditional Lands or disregarded entirely. The only unique thing going on here is Stony Silence, and the choice to play them followed (and was contingent on) the decision to play Hall of Heliod’s generosity. These were specifically for Doomsday, Storm, 8-Cast, and the initiative matchup, and I was rewarded in the main event with a takedown of Doomsday that involved double game wins after my opponent resolved a discard spell to see my hand and then piled with Doomsday, one of which was directly attributable to having the Stony available to buy back with Hall.

MATCHES

Round 1: BR goblins 2-0. Opponent kept a one lander without vial and got Waste/Tabby’d, game 2 he mulled to 4 looking for more than one land.

In: Maze, Drop, Chasm
Out: karakas, Bojuka Bog, Tower

Round 2: Cephalid Breakfast 0-2. This is the guy who went undefeated day 1; he just had the Nomads combo both games. This is a match where we only win with a fast combo, there is no reasonable line for mana disruption so we just min-max disruption and exolosiveness.

In: Choke, Drop, Stony, Force, Endurance
Out: Karakas, Mazes, Tabby, Wasteland, Ghost Quarter

Round 3: 4-color Yorion Zenith 0-2. This guy dropped a couple rounds later, played super slow, and picked up at least two draws. I had 15 mins for a game 2 and 3 and sideboarded for the clock, not to win, so not much to say. Player was not great but infinite basics, mainboard land recursion, and Primeval Titan is unbeatable.

Round 4: Delver 2-1. I win game 1, make a speculative keep game 2 because I’m up and opponent draws well, but no way was Delver getting two games off this list in a single round.

In: Drop, Choke, Maze
Out: Karakas, Tower, one Stage/one Depths

Round 5: Doomsday 2-1. I win game 1 and game 3, both after opponent has Duressed me and then Doomsday piled. Game 1 they didn’t pile mana sources correctly and triple Ghost Quarter over the following turn cycle broke their pile. In G3, they missed that my Ghost Quarter forcing a pass of the turn also let me recur the Ghost Quarter and Hall back Stony, so the double turn-pass turned into locking out the Petal they were going to use.

In: Endurance, Stony Silence
Out: Bog, Tower, Karakas, 2 Maze of Ith, Scattered Groves

Round 6: Delver 2-1. Same sideboard as before, much the same story.

Round 7: Yorion Death & Taxes 2-0. I’m scared enough of Kaldra that I mainboard the Tower. Opponent kept a double nonbasic/Vial hand game 1 and didn’t draw a second land after my double Wasteland + Boseiju until I already had double active field. Game 2, I had turn 1 Manabond, turn 2 Mulch, make like 12 zombies.

In: Drop, Maze, 1 Stony Silence (very speculative)
Out: Bog, 1 Boseiju, Scattered Groves

Round 8: Boros Initiative 2-0. Opponent keeps on 4 or 5 both games with a turn 1 play, which gets summarily Mazed while I Wasteland them into oblivion.

In: Maze, Drop, 1 Stony.
Out: Tower, Bog, Karakas

Round 9: White Initiative 1-2. All three games were nut draws by both of us; we agreed in discussion of hands afterwards that the player on the play was 100% to win each game–nothing on the draw for them beats good Manabond hands, nothing on the draw for us beats good Chalice into threat hands. Same sb as before, but I strongly considered Force of Vigor.

Round 10: Delver 2-0. Same sb as before. Opponent attempted to Price + Volt me out with good timing but I was playing around it and survived it at three, and they lost all five red sources as a result of trying to set it up, so they scooped.

CLOSING THOUGHTS

Where does Lands go from here? Honestly, as long as Iteration and initiative are here, I think Mulch is the build, Urza’s Saga is bad, and splashes will get punished. My instinct is that initiative will probably diverge into two shells: a white-based prison shell with lock bears, and a Mox Diamond and Gemstone Caverns Boros pile with 12 initiative threats and Once Upon a Time. I think we have very different gameplans against those two decks, so really testing the matchup isn’t feasible until the target is better defined.

The format as a whole has gotten more coinflippy; I’m not sure it’s good gameplay overall, but from a competitive standpoint I think being the 80-20 favorite on a per-game basis against Delver and having a literal coinflip matchup with initiative is a fine place to be. I believe there is more that can be done to optimize the GW 8-Mulch shell that I played, and I think if I had a year of reps instead of 4 months of jamming once a week, I would have finished X-2 and been on the hunt for a top 16 on breakers instead of a top 32 (which I missed anyway, and the current standings show it being nowhere close thanks to my carmate winning it all and destroying my breakers in the top 8).

A big shoutout to my airbnb folks from Games and Comics Pair ‘o’ Dice in Fairfax VA, Carson, Nathan, and Jay. It was a big boost to be there with a team versus going the trip solo, and the family style dinners were great. For those that are watching, our shop is becoming a hub for eternal play–we put a sponsored finalist and a top 16 player up in CEDH at Oko-Tober this year, Jay took down EW and I made top 64 this weekend, and we’ve got a weekly Sunday morning old school for 15+ folks firing now. Cheers to all, and may your dredges always flip gas!

Part 1: The List

I haven’t really played any serious legacy since July.  So when it was time for a paper 1k, I had to do some catching up.  The currently-popular build for RG lands is the 4-saga, endurance-main build.  Popularized largely by the wild success and fantastic content put out by alli, Saga Lands has an aggressive constructs gameplan backed up by the chapter 3 toolbox and Endurances main to fight the format’s top combo decks.  

For this event I played the non-saga version of the RG lands. Obviously, it paid off, due to a combination of a dead-on metagame read and massive quantities of luck. Of course, nobody wins a magic tournament on skill alone, so let’s see how I got there. 

My expected metagame for this event was Delver, Elves, Moon Stompy, Goblins, and Reanimator in roughly that order, followed by a smattering of control and Knight decks.  

Based on that, I was pretty dedicated to registering 4 Dark Depths.  Once I had four Dark Depths in my deck, it became difficult to fit 4 Urza’s Saga and two or more tutor targets into the list. I was also wedded to the idea of registering at least one Minsc and Boo since the card was new and I thought it seemed fun. It’s also probably one of the best things to be doing against Taxes and GW depths, two matchups where cutting Sagas in favor of Depths is hurting you the most. 

I based my list on Japanese player dull04.  You can see their version and read how they approach the UR delver matchup here. The page also links their older article discussing why they prefer just one Urza’s Saga for late game stage tricks to the more aggressive 4 Saga + Bullets strategy.  They explain themselves better than I ever will on the subject, but I want to add one additional point.

The best way to beat combo decks as lands is to play 4 Dark Depths, load up on 0-mana interaction, and pray. 

The absolute best case scenario for saga v combo is

T1: Mox, saga, sphere of resistance
T2: make a construct
T3: make a construct, resolve ch3, attack for 5
T4: attack for 10
T5: attack for 10 (Opponent loses)

Now obviously, the artifact you search off chapter three could be impactful (Cage, Needle, Thran Foundry).  But the important thing is that this is never faster than a zero-acceleration Depths/Stage combo, but has two notable downsides.

First, all of your mana is spoken for on turns 2 and 3, if they force you to interact on those turns, you can’t make constructs which slows your clock.

Second, your interaction (Sphere, Saga targets) is answered by the same sideboard hammers that clear your threats (constructs).  Your opponent can safely tap out for Recall, Meltdown, or Serenity knowing that you are a few turns away from deploying another threat. 

Compare this to Dark Depths, which has a lot of potential lines for a turn 3 kill (Exploration + 4 lands, double Mox + combo, Mox + double Crop) and significantly more ways that Crop Rotation facilitates those fast lines.  This is especially important in matchups where Crop Rotation IS interaction like Reanimator, since holding up Crop can then convert immediately into killing your opponent if they take the turn off.  And since our threat is creating Marit Lage (a 20/20 black avatar creature token with flying and indestructible) at instant speed, the avenues for the combo player to fight back are a lot narrower. 

So, the plan against combo decks:

a. Create Marit Lage as fast as possible and kill our opponent 

b. Present enough 0-mana interaction to get to turn 3, execute (a).

In my opinion, Spheres are too slow and often ineffective against the best combo decks of the format (Reanimator, Oops, Doomsday’s Fastest Draws).  They also slow our ability to assemble a win via Crop Rotation or hold up Blasts and Endurance.  Sphere’s best matchups, slow combo like ANT and Sneak/Show have been mostly replaced by TES and MonoR storm, both of which can overpower or go under a Sphere easily.  I don’t want my combo answers to be reliant on drawing a second card (Mox) and also being on the play.  In the meantime, I’ve put one Mindbreak Trap in the deck and will just hope, if i’m playing against Storm, that they wheel me into it.  If you’re worried about the matchup for some reason, add more Mindbreaks. The Torpor Orb is a Sphere-like card against Doomsday and Oops that doubles as hate for Death and Taxes, where I think Saga is actually missed.    

Also I just hate topdecking Shadowspear, and Saga COMES OUT against UR Delver.

Four Depths, One Urza’s Saga, No Sphere of Resistance.  The remaining points of interest are 16 colored sources including snow-covered forest (I wanted to maximize my consistency, especially with casting Endurance under Blood Moon; you can probably cut Forest or a fetch and be fine), and Valakut Exploration.  

Valakut Exploration is a powerful card that has probably seen its best days already.  I think if you’re playing a more Field of the Dead-focused game against slower decks you need more ways to generate card advantage, which Valakut is decent at.  In retrospect I think just playing at least one more copy of Minsc would have been better, since the card has the same potential effect of getting ahead of cards while also killing your opponent a lot faster, and providing crucial board impact that Valakut lacks. Both can be Hydroblasted but Minsc is harder to Prismatic and is immune to enchantment removal.

The Bolts are alli’s tech from the recent showcase list and performed great all day. 

The rough sideboard mapping I threw together for this list is below.  Note that I didn’t bring this with me to the event and just used it as a deckbuilding exercise, so while you’re busy not taking everything as gospel, especially don’t take this as a sideboard guide.

What this reveals is that I probably have one too many cards against Delver and a really messy mapping against GW Depths.

Part of the solution I worked on was cutting Reclaimer and working some number of Endurances into the main but I was worried about finding my Field of the Dead against control and couldn’t figure out what the next sideboard slots would be (I wanted something for control but not Delver or GW depths).

As usual for the last few events I’ve played, Field was completely useless, but the matchup lottery paid off extremely well for Dark Depths.

Either way I didn’t want to agonize over it because I knew I was going to be winning with raw skill. 

Part 2: The Event

As usual we’re driving two hours to get to the event in the morning.  It’s actually the same store as my win from last year (report here, unfortunately the writing was better last year but hopefully ya’ll still enjoy this one).  

I’m getting over a pretty serious concussion so the drive up is not the most pleasant experience but I’m really wanting to get out of the house.  On the drive up I listen to Black Country New Road’s stellar Ant’s From Up Here.  Everyone needs to hear it.  This report is secretly a BCNR shill piece, and with the release of 40k commander decks, it’s officially a Magic the Gathering album.

“Show me the land you acquired”  asks Isaac.  Hopefully my opponents feel the same way. 

Around 32 players came to game today, good for 5 rounds.   Around half as many as last year’s event.  Presumably the RCQ season gives people an alternate thing to do with their wizard time.  I’ve also learned and manage to my online decklist submission the night before, which unfortunately stops me from making the last-minute swap to 2 Minsc, 2 Valakut. 

Round 1: Elves LWW (1-0)

Game 1: I roll up to round one against an opponent I think I recognize but can’t name.  They are wearing a sports jersey so I assume I’m getting comboed (cannot elaborate further on the read). Based on this I win the die roll and keep a middling 7 with exploration, two green sources, field, Crop and two more lands that aren’t combo pieces.  I deploy my spells and hold up crop for whatever spooky shit is going on, which turns out to be Forest, Nettle Sentinel from the opponent. I take my draw step, rotate for Tabernacle, and deploy one of many disappointing Field of the Deads. Two turns of drawing Mox Diamond later, my Tabernacle is Boseiju’d and I die to Shepherd activations. 

I sideboard as planned but add Mindbreak Trap since I saw Nettle and Birchlore, which indicates the combo-heavy variant instead of the new Fiend Artisan hotness.  This is potentially bad for me because people who netdeck Newton aren’t going to have run afoul based on the last list I saw, but my opponent could easily be playing cards that are good against me. 

My opponent comments that this round’s going to be over a lot quicker than our last, revealing them to be the GW depths player I went to time against last year.  Thank you for switching decks.

Game 2: They T1 Green Sun’s for Dryad which I Lightning Bolt end of turn. Being used to paying two for removal spells, this is very exciting for me.  I experience what people call “Tempo” (which as far as can tell is when you are winning). I have the natural Tabernacle which they sac a Birchlore to in order to Boseiju it, then drop a bunch of dorks onto the table. I rotate for blast zone killing four creatures, trigger Field of the Dead and my opponent concedes.  Field of the dead will not be mentioned again in this document.

Game 3: We play the same Tabernacle-into-Boseiju game which slows them down while I Waste their mana.  Eventually I drop Minsc and Boo onto a board against three dorks, throw the 4/4 hamster into their Symbiote which draws me into the combo and I create the first of many Marits Lages for the day. My opponent tries to combo off with two Glimpse into the Run Afouls they now feel comfortable telling me they’re playing but miscounts their mana and fizzles.  I fly to victory.

Round 2: 8-Cast WW (2-0) 

My opponent was sitting next to me so I know him to be on 8-cast, which I think is a really volatile matchup that I don’t super want to be seeing.  There’s a lot of ways they can get out of control with a fast start but knowing what I’m up against gives me a huge edge in mulligans.  Basically if they activate Urza’s saga and I don’t immediately Force of Vigor or show them the witch the game is over. 

Game 1:  I have Exploration into a Wasteland for their first Saga but they have an unanswered Emry.  They take a bunch of damage off Ancient Tomb getting a Cannoneer out and I untap and resolve Minsc and Boo. They can’t swing into Minsc without dying on the crack back so Kappa Cannoneer has to chump the 8/8 hamster and they die a turn later.  

Hamster 1: Turtle 0

Board according to plan. 

Game 2: They have a turn 1 Chalice for 1 which turns off the two blasts in my hand, and they Force my turn 1 library, but don’t have a backup threat so I make two more land drops then show my opponent the Witch.  They’d played their Otawara turn one and can’t get Spellbomb through their own Chalice so I fade Borrower and win.

After the game I have time to sit down and finish Don DeLillio’s White Noise.  The most I’ve laughed at a book this year.  A bit antiseptic but truly thrilling.  Adam Driver / Greta Gerwing adaptation later this year is, um, surely something that you could choose to watch on your television. 

Round 3: UR Delver WW (3-0)

Game 1: My opponent wins the die roll then leads on a naked Volcanic and Baubles me.  I draw the Port they saw and play it out before passing.  This apparently signals extreme weakness as they waste my Port and Ponder.  I know that that play just lost them the game.  I resolve Exploration through Daze, double Maze forces them to overextend into a Blast Zone for three creatures and they scoop to a Loam lock a few turns later. 

I can’t decide which two of Exploration, Loam, and 4th Depths should come out in this matchup.  All future delver games should be assumed to have been chosen at random between those.  Sound off in the chat about how I should have better constructed my deck to not have to deal with this. 

Game 2:  My favorite Lands games are the ones where you just play out your lands and don’t cast any spells.  My opponent leads on turn 1 Delver, so I answer it by putting a Maze into play.  Then a Wasteland.  On turn three I play Boseiju into my only spell of the game, an Exploration which gets Forced.   Once again my opponent smells blood and wastes my “exposed” green source.  Three turns later I have zero forests in play and create Marit Lage, a 20/20 avatar creature token with flying and indestructible that also can’t be submerged.

Round 4: Intentional Draw (3-0-1)

Draws should be worth zero points. I will die on this hill.  Anything else incentivizes slower play which is chronically difficult to enforce and allows situations like this where I get lucky my first three matches and handshake into top 8.  Zero point draws incentivizes players to take risks to finish the match or they both lose. 

Anyway I went and got a falafel sandwich during my first off round.  It was decent.  The other three undefeated players in my draw bracket are 2x Moon Stompy 1x UR Delver. 

Round 5: Intentional Draw (3-0-2)

I’m supposed to be spending a lot of time resting in dark, quite places for the concussion so I take a nap in my car for the first half of this round. The car turns out to be neither quite nor dark but where else would I go?

When I get back to the event space I find out that seeds 5 and 6 also drew in (Reanimator Mirror), leaving only two matches in play to decide Top 8.   UR Delver v Taxes and UR Delver v Goblins.

I watch enough of the Goblins match to figure out what’s going on.  Really exciting new build with the Seething Song stickers goblin, Chrome Mox, and Skirk Prospector + the new lord that lets you play cards off impulse when goblins die.  Dan is storming off a bunch but gets a few crucial spells Forced and dies to Staticaster because his Delver opponent decided to change two sideboard cards and flip the matchup today. 

On the other table, Death and Taxes loses to Murktide Regent, bringing the top 8 to:

3x UR Delver

2x Moon Stompy

2x BR Reanimator

1x GR Lands

I’m very clearly fighting for the side of good in this one, but I take the prize split so nobody gets mad at me.  We’re still competing for the invitational qualification anyway so it’s ok. 

I end up dropping to 5th seed but I’m ahead of both reanimator players which is really what matters. 

Quarterfinals: UR Delver WLW (4-0-1)

I sit down against my opponent who I know to be a Delver player with a truly glacial pace of play.   Time for some untimed magic in the truest sense of the word. 

Game 1:  My opponent is higher seed so they play first, opening on Island, Ponder.  This is a scary start for me since they know the matchup and kept a seven without a turn 1 threat.   I have Mox+Reclaimer and try to bait my opponent into Bolting it with a Crop into Waste as protection.  They pick up and read Elvish reclaimer a few times then decide not to.  Reclaimer Bogs them to slow down the game but I’m low on resources while they keep chaining Iterations so I’m forced into the combo which they have Borrower for.  I greedily play into Daze which tags my Loam and stops me from repeating the combo. 

One of the Reanimator players stops by to let us know that they’re waiting for us in top4.

Their Delver flips off Ponder, which they cast surveilling the instant/creature they need to activate two Channelers.  The sudden burst of damage takes me to 6 through my Maze.

My opponent has two Volcanics in play and two cards in hand.  2x Delirious Channelers, Insectile Aberration, and a Murktide.  

I have Maze, Forest, Mox, Port and a Reclaimer in play.  

My hand is Loam, Crop, Exploration.

Graveyard contains the combo, Yavimaya, Bog, and some fetches. 

What’s the play? 

I cast loam targeting Yavimaya, Stage, Depths.  My opponent asks how much mana I have in play.  I tell them the Port is my only available mana source.  They tank for a while, then read elvish reclaimer.  They Daze Loam returning volc to their hand. I pay, then put Depths and Yavimaya into play.  Yavimaya leaves me with three mana so I rotate for a Wasteland, Waste their Volc, and Reclaimer for Tabernacle. 

I silently pause to reflect on the words of Exodus 25:9, which all skilled Lands players have tattooed on some hidden part of their body.

My opponent says that they’d forgotten about the Tabernacle, puts all their creatures into the graveyard and concedes. 

The reanimator player drops by again to let us know that the Moon Stompy mirror is starting in the other semifinal. 

Game 2:  For the sake of brevity, I play around one Daze but not two, lose my Library to double Daze, and my opponent finds two Borrowers in two turns for my Marit Lages and I’m too far behind on resources to rebuild before dying to chip damage.

One of the Moon Stompy players drops by to let us know they lost the mirror.  Apparently their opponent drew more Furies and it sounded miserable.  Moon stompy in the Finals.

Game 3:  I’m a bit spooked by two Borrowers so I keep a slow midrange 7 with Reclaimer, Endurance, Bolt, Blast, Fetch, Grove, Port.  I play out my Reclaimer turn 1 into a Bolt which is probably loose and Blast their turn 3 Iteration for a land.  I’m stuck on three mana sources myself for a few turns before finally drawing a Stage and resolving my Endurance through Daze.  They untap and Maddening Hex me.  This is not good.  

I have the combo in play but they have a Wasteland and I don’t have a 6th land to activate Port. I chat with my opponent about what happens if Stage copies a basic.  I finally draw a mana source for Port and make a serious mistake by not immediately comboing them in their upkeep, punished horribly when they put a second Wasteland into play.  In retrospect they could have easily Wasted my depths to force the issue if they had Borrower since I was unlikely to be able to rebuild through the Hex when I’ve clearly missed the last 5 or 6 land drops. 

I’m drawing Moxes and Libraries instead of mana sources I need to orce the combo through while they Iterate through their deck and refill the grave for a Murktide. I Blast, they tank, then remember their Hex trigger, and I roll a 5, going from 18 to 13.   They force my Blast and Murktide resolves.  Murktide enters the red zone and I Punishing Fire before blocks, rolling a 4, down to 9.  Endurance trades with the punished Murktide, leaving my opponent with a non-delirious Channeler, Hex and a pile of lands.  They read punishing fire.  They say “so you can get it back with red mana.”  I tell them yes, but I need them to gain life in order to trigger it, pointing at my tapped Grove and sole red source.  They waste the Grove in main phase two. Suddenly I have outs.  I untap, topdeck a mana source, and create Marit Lage, a 20/20 black avatar creature token with indestructible and flying.  They show me force + land in hand and scoop it up.  In fairness to my opponent, they were out of Iterations and I was going to draw Boseiju next, potentially unlocking my hand of card advantage spells and bolts.  Out of the marathon and on to the semifinals. 

Semifinals: BR Reanimator LWW (5-0-1)

My semis opponent is someone I know as a really skilled player of Maverick-style brews (Knight of the Reliquary is a big problem for lands.  Terravore is worse).  Thankfully they’ve instead decided to play a deck I have a chance of beating with my seeding-determined play option and 13-card sideboard strategy. 

Game 1: I mull a 7 that casts turn 3 Minsc and Boo, then groan as I see Minsc in my next hand, but it has Crop + green source so we’re keeping.  Minsc goes to the bottom, I hold up Crop and my opponent shows why they kept 7 by Griefing my Crop and reanimating Archon. I don’t need them to go through the motions at that point so I pack it up and go to sideboard. 

Game 2:  I keep another 6 with Exploration, double green source, Crop and the combo. They mull to 6, loot Emissary to the grave and try to go off without protection. Crop into Bog wipes the grave and they can’t rebuild before I apply the Witch to their face two turns later.  

Between games two and three I ask my opponent how low they’ve mulliganed today.   They laugh and say that was the first mulligan they’d taken.  This is clearly how you get to the semifinals.  

Game 3: I keep a very mid 6 with Endurance, Loam, and a Stage but no acceleration or second piece of interaction.  They mull to 5 and go Fetch pass. They’re digging for an Entomb effect while I draw a Library and take 8 immediately, giving me Mox + Depths. Play four copies of your best cards. I put the combo onto the field and they try to go off with Unmask on themselves into Animate Dead on Grislebrand but I pitch cast Endurance and they scoop before I can get my token out. 

After the game I learn that the 7 my opponent kept was a no-land turn 1 hardcast Magus, which I was probably cold to.  They were worried about getting raced by Endurance but I don’t think I can reliably cast it in time under a moon.  Into the finals. 

Finals: Moon Stompy WLW (6-0-1)

Finals is against local twitch celebrity Tony Murata (into_play on twitch), a long-time Cloudpost player who’s recently decided to pick up Moon Prison.  I’m pretty confident about my plan for the matchup but definitely don’t feel favored.

Game 1: I keep a turn 2 combo off a basic against their mull to 5.  Unfortunately they have a turn 1 Blood Moon off two Chrome Mox, leaving them with no cards in hand. We play draw-go for a minute with Tony playing out low-value lock pieces like Trinisphere before drawing a threat, which thankfully is a hardcast Simian.  I take two for a bit before drawing a Valakut Exploration for the first time this tournament. Valakut goes off, flipping into multiple Explorations and my opponent concedes when I have three Valakut, three Exploration in play and find Boseiju.  Feeling really good about beating g1 t1 Blood Moon, we go to sideboard.

Game 2:  I keep 6 with Reclaimer off a basic, natural Depths and a Punishing Fire for Magus.   Tony has Moon instead of Magus which is how we lose this matchup.  I’m activating Reclaimer to thin the deck while Hearse prevents my Reclaimer from being an effective blocker and I die 10 turns later to Fable beats without finding a disenchant effect. 

Game 3: On the play I keep Depths, Stage, Yavimaya, Exploration, Punishing fire, which is extremely good as long as my opponent doesn’t have turn 1 Magus or Dead//Gone.  Their 7 produces a turn 1 Rabblemaster, I mainphase my combo for no apparent reason other than being sleepy, and they flip the top card of their deck to reveal it’s not Dead//Gone.  That’s game. 

The big plus of the smaller event is we’re done in time to get a Dosa, which is what we drove up for in the first place.  They completely mess up my order but it’s still good.  Can’t complain at all. 

Introduction

I got the idea for this article when discussing if Endurance is a sideboard or a maindeck card. At the spoiler of MH2 my first reaction was that Endurance could be a turn 0 answer to combo decks such as Reanimator and Doomsday. I figured that it could also come in vs Delver and it replaced 2 of the 3 Shifting Ceratops that I had in the sideboard specifically for this matchup. 

My first level-up came a few months later when I read a tweet from the Japanese Lands master Hori Masataka saying that Endurance is the best answer to Knight of the Reliquary. I had primarily played Endurance as a stonewall effect vs Delver but as I fully realized that it has flash (also if you pay 3 mana for it) then I started to use it more like a removal spell. It’s a bit situational, and it doesn’t always answer creatures with static abilities such as Goblin Welder, Elvish Reclaimer or Dark Confidant, but it’s no more situational than other red-green removal such as Punishing Fire or Drop of Honey. Endurance can even be flashed in on our opponent’s end-step and kill an opposing Narset or Karn (similar to how Vendilion Clique used to be one of the best answers to Jace). As I started viewing Endurance as a removal spell it made more sense to put it into the maindeck instead of the sideboard. 

My last level-up came a few months later when I played with my friend and coach Andreas Petersen (ecobaronen). We were playing vs Painter and the boardstate was empty as we had spent the first turns trading resources with our opponent. We had Endurance in our hand and I kept thinking of it as a removal spell for a potential Magus of the Moon that our opponent could draw. Andreas asked me, “why don’t we cast Endurance and smash our opponent 4 times and then they’re dead?” After this game I started to mentally realize that Endurance can also smash my opponent’s face, and this is very good in an aggro deck like Lands. My opponents will often take a few hits by my Constructs and then be forced to use their removal on them. This opens up for Endurance to come down and finish the job. After I have started to play Endurance more proactively my win-rate vs Uro decks such as Blue-Zenith has increased significantly. I now make Constructs in the early turns and wait for them to cast their first Uro before I snap in Endurance and kill them before they can find another Uro to stabilize.

How does this tie back to deckbuilding and sideboarding? Well, we moved Endurance from our sideboard to the maindeck and we now had 3 new sideboard slots to discuss in the Lands discord. Some people told me that they still lost to Reanimator and they wanted to fill those 3 extra slots with Surgical Extractions. I even played 2 Surgical Extractions in a Showcase Challenge earlier this year. Guess what, one of my losses in that tournament was against Reanimator. In G3 my opponent had an explosive turn 1 of Swamp, Dark Ritual, Lotus Petal, Show and Tell into Archon. My hand had both Endurance and Surgical Extraction in it. My conclusion after the tournament was that we can’t really beat the nut draws from Reanimator and we shouldn’t even try to do this. Our goal is not to get a 100% winrate vs Reanimator. In fact we couldn’t even get a 100% winrate if we tried because Reanimator is a proactive and powerful strategy. They can always have draws that beat ours. If we plot our expected winrate vs Reanimator as a function of the number of graveyard hate pieces that we play then we would see that at some point there is diminishing returns (meaning that each additional slot of graveyard hate increases our winrate less than the previous did).

We have convinced ourselves that we shouldn’t try to get a 100% winrate vs Reanimator. What should we do then? We want to maximize our expected winrate in the tournament which is the sum of all our winrates in the various matchups times the metashare of those matchups. It’s an empirical law that all decks are at least 2 sideboard slots short of covering all matchups in Legacy. This means that we have to make some sacrifices and every slot that we dedicate towards Combo is a slot that we cannot use to improve our Tempo, Control or Midrange matchups. In some metagames it can be correct to completely ignore some matchups if their metashare is low. 

Who is favored in a matchup?

Another thing that I see many inexperienced players do is to waste sideboard slots vs their already good matchups. This might be because they don’t really know if they are favored or not in the matchup. Maybe they’ve only played it a few times and lost. 

I like to use the following diagram to visualize who is favored in a given matchup. On one axis I have my draw (bad, average, good) on the other axis I have their draw (bad, average, good). In this context “draw” means your starting hand plus all cards that you draw in the game. My rule of thumb is that if I win the games where we both have an average draw then I will have a positive winrate (+60%) in the matchup. After all, most games will play out in such a way that both players have an average draw. If I also win the games where both players are having a good draw then my winrate will be even higher in the matchup.

Let’s look at a concrete example to illustrate this method: Lands vs Elves. I would argue that a good Lands hand will beat a good Elves hand. Let’s look at some good Lands hands for inspiration:

• Turn two Marit Lage on the play.
• Turn three Marit Lage plus early removal.
• Exploration, Life from the Loam, Grove of the Burnwillows, Punishing Fire.
• Mox Diamond, Sphere of Resistance, Tabernacle.

I would also argue that an average Lands hand will win over an average Elves hand. In fact any Lands hand that has access to Tabernacle will likely beat an average Elves hand. 

This does not mean that we have a 100% winrate vs Elves. A good Elves draw will definitely win over a bad Lands draw and possibly also over an average Lands draw. Here are some examples of good Elves draws:

• Explosive Glimpse hands.
• Multiple Cradles and Natural Order.

Drawing up your matchup like this can help you understand where to focus your sideboard slots. If you already have a very good matchup then I wouldn’t waste sideboard slots to improve this specific matchup.

Efficient Deckbuilding

As I said in the introduction there is an empirical law that we are always (at least) 2 sideboard slots short of covering all matchups in Legacy. In order to optimize our overall winrate we should therefore look for cards that are efficient i.e. they improve a matchup without requiring many slots (typically bombs that can be tutored or cantripped into). We can also look for cards that overlap vs many matchups (such as counterspells or discard spells). In this section I go over the major archetypes in Legacy and how I think you can attack them in an efficient manner.

Combo

In my opinion the most efficient way to combat a combo deck is to attack them from multiple angles:

• Stack based interaction. 
• Discard spells.
• Permanent based hate.
• Fast clock.

This is good because combo decks cannot afford to spend many slots on interaction. Take Storm for example, they play 6-8 discard spells (ANT) or 4 Veil of Summer (TES). If they expect all your interaction to be permanent based then they can swap Veil of Summer for Chain of Vapor. But it gets a lot harder for them to sideboard if they have to respect both stack based and permanent based interaction. If they are forced to bring in Chain of Vapor but also keep in Veil of Summer then they will have to side out some combo pieces or cantrips (and this makes their deck slower and less consistent). These games will typically go longer and this will favor you because you will draw more of your interaction.

I usually feel favored if I can attack a combo deck from 3 different angles. For example, in current iterations of Legacy Lands it’s possible to attack Doomsday from 3 different angles. If you look at my decklist from the last Showcase Challenge you can see that I only have one slot that is dedicated towards Doomsday (Thran Foundry) but since it’s a 1 mana artifact I can tutor for it with Urza’s Saga. I feel very comfortable playing vs Doomsday post sideboard as I have: 

• Stack based interaction in Endurance and Pyroblast.
• Permanent based hate in Thran Foundry and Sphere of Resistance (combined with mana denial).
• A fast clock thanks to my Constructs or Marit Lage.

This video demonstrates pretty well how games of Lands vs Doomsday play out in my experience. 

My final advice for combating Combo decks is that there is a form of “cheese” or “brewers advantage” to be found when building your sideboard vs these decks. If you play a deck like Death & Taxes or Lands that typically attack Storm with taxing effects then you can improve your winrate more by adding a card like Mindbreak Trap instead of another Sphere effect. This is partly because of diversification (as discussed above) but it’s also because you catch them by surprise. It’s very possible that a Storm deck has 0 actual outs to a Mindbreak Trap post sideboard vs Lands. 

Control

There are two ways to beat control decks. You can either try to overload them with card advantage or find a threat that they can’t answer. In my opinion the first way is suboptimal, if you try to maximize your expected winrate vs the entire field, because it will require many slots. You are trying to beat them at their own game. They dedicate a lot of slots to card advantage such as Narset, Expressive Iteration, Sylvan Library, Uro, Predict, Standstill, Jace. You will have to dedicate more slots if you want to reliably beat them on this axis. This can definitely be done by the Lands archetype. If you look at a deck like 8-Mulch they in fact try to overload the Control deck by playing eight Mulch effects on top of four Life from the Loam. This comes with a cost though and it makes 8-Mulch worse vs other parts of the Legacy field. 

My other issue with going the 8-Mulch route is that if the control players feel like they’re losing the card advantage race then they can go the opposite route and just jam red sideboard cards like From the Ashes and Blood Moon. What does it matter if you draw 4 lands with Mulch if they are all Basic Mountains? In fact this is exactly what happened when 8-Mulch broke out earlier this year, the meta started to get very hostile towards Lands. 

This is why I prefer the other way to attack control decks i.e. to try and find a threat that they cannot answer. By doing this we turn the game into something else than “who can draw the most cards”. Delver decks have historically been really good at doing this by playing cards such as True-Name Nemesis, Klothys, God of Destiny, or Court of Cunning. If we manage to stick such a threat against a Control deck then we exploit their biggest weakness which is that they can’t close the game quickly. I learned to appreciate this strategy in the Snowko era. If I managed to resolve a Klothys vs Snowko then I had effectively nullified all their Uro’s, and Klothys gave them 6-7 turns to kill me before they would be dead. They simply couldn’t race Klothys unless they already had an active Oko. Today’s Control decks are better at answering threats thanks to Prismatic Ending and they also have a faster clock in Minsc & Boo so this strategy is harder to execute but it can still be done. Here are some examples on threats that a Lands deck can play that is very hard for a Control deck to combat:

• Thespian’s Stage copying Urza’s Saga and then a basic land.
• Choke.
• Cavern of Souls and Primeval Titan into Field of the Dead.

If you play online then another resource to be mindful about is the clock. This is often the most important resource when playing against Control. I try to ensure that I have more time than my opponent already from the very first turns of the game. I will restart my computer in between each round (and sometimes before going to sideboarding) to avoid having lag. This strategy is also exploiting the fact that Control decks can have a hard time closing the game, and the Lands deck can play defense rather well with Marit Lage (+20 life), Karakas, Maze of Ith, Constructs and Punishing Fire. This strategy is so effective that it has made me reevaluate cards. Take Sylvan Library for example. I used to think of it as they’re trading 12-16 life for 3-4 cards, but now I think about it as they’re trading 5-10 minutes of their clock for 3-4 cards. The latter is typically not a profitable trade and, although they might win G1, they have set themselves up to lose the entire match. 

If you want to learn more about Lands vs Control then you can read this deep dive that I wrote last year.

Non-Blue Midrange

This category contains all non-blue midrange decks such as Death & Taxes, Elves, Goblins, Maverick, GW Depths, Lands. There are two ways to beat these decks. You can either hate them out or you can try to go bigger than them. Midrange decks revolve around creatures and / or lands, and there are plenty of excellent hate cards for these. Here are some examples: 

• Death & Taxes: Dread of Night, Massacre.
• Elves: Plague Engineer, Perish, Opposition Agent.
• Goblins: Plague Engineer, Pyroclasm.
• Maverick: Perish, Terminus.
• GW Depths: Perish, Terminus, Blood Moon, Price of Progress.
• Lands: Blood Moon, Price of Progress, Ruination, Force of Vigor.

The stronger a hate card is vs a certain matchup the more narrow it typically is. Massacre, for example, is extremely good vs Death & Taxes but pretty bad vs Elves or Goblins. In some metas it can still be a good idea to add a few narrow hate cards but in other metas it’s better to look for hate that have a broader application. This all depends on the distribution of the non-blue Midrange decks. 

None of the non-blue Midrange decks can play Force of Will and this is their biggest weakness in my opinion. If you go bigger than these decks then you exploit this weakness. They won’t be able to stop you from casting your spells, and if you have a strategy that simply wins when both players are casting their spells then you will have a good time vs non-blue Midrange decks. This is easiest achieved by playing a Combo deck, but it can also be accomplished by non-combo decks that play cards like Shark Typhoon or Primeval Titan. 

Lands as a deck is very good against the other non-blue Midrange decks (except those that play Knight of the Reliquary) because we can both go over them (via ramp into Field of the Dead or by creating large Constructs) and we also have Tabernacle as a maindeck tutor-able hate card. Tabernacle is strong because it stops our opponent from swarming the board. They have to use their mana to keep their first 2-3 creatures alive and then they can’t deploy more creatures to the board. This allows the Lands deck to reach the endgame where we are favored thanks to Urza’s Saga and Field of the Dead. If you want to learn more about Lands vs non-blue Midrange you can study these resources:

• Lands vs Maverick
• Lands vs Elves
• Lands vs GW Depths

Tempo

I saved the big bad tempo archetype for last. It should be obvious by now that combining cheap undercosted creatures with free interaction is the best macro strategy in Legacy. As I have explained in the previous sections the Combo, Control and Midrange archetypes all have strategic weaknesses that can be exploited but this isn’t really true for the Tempo archetype. 

• Tempo decks have, unlike Combo and Midrange decks, plenty of slots for generic interaction and most of it is free so they can progress their proactive gameplan while holding up counterspells. 
• Tempo decks can, unlike Control decks, finish a game quickly and they can often race any “hard to answer” threat that you might present to them. 

There is another fundamental strength to the Tempo archetype that shouldn’t be forgotten. It’s the implicit card advantage that they gain by playing fewer lands than their opponent. They get away with this because their threats are undercosted. Norwegian Legacy Grandmaster MatsOle once said something along the lines of “it’s hard to combat Delver when their 2’s (2 drops) are stronger than our 3’s (3 drops)”. Midrange decks have to play acceleration such as Mox Diamond, Aether Vial or Ancient Tomb just to keep up with the raw efficiency of the Tempo threats. In a long and grindy game the Tempo deck will often be up 2-3 cards by simply drawing less lands / acceleration than their opponent. Historically, every time that the Tempo archetype has access to actual card advantage spells like Treasure Cruise, Dreadhorde Arcanist, or Expressive Iteration it gets broken and forces a ban onto the format. These cards were all really powerful but they were also just the straw that broke the camel’s back in my opinion.

I’m not saying that it’s impossible to get a favorable matchup vs UR Delver but you need to respect this deck. It’s not enough to put 1 basic mountain in your sideboard and hope for the best. You need to build your maindeck as a well oiled machine, without any clunky / cute cards, and you also need to dedicate 6-8 of your sideboard slots for Tempo. This is what I mean when I say that Wasteland and Daze dictate what cards that are playable in your Legacy maindeck. 

So what can we do to combat the Tempo archetype? You can attack them in a few different ways and none of them works every time:

• Attack their mana. They play few lands and very few basics so you can sometimes mana screw them out of playing the game. This strategy was always risky, as they don’t need a lot of lands to operate, but it has gotten even worse vs the current iterations of UR Delver. Most of their threats cost 1 mana now instead of 2 and Dragon’s Rage Channeler in particular is excellent at helping them find more lands. I used to win somewhere between 20%-30% of my games by wasteland locking my opponent out but now it’s more like 10%-20%.
• Big dumb creature. Their removal is damage based so they can have a hard time answering a big dumb creature like Marit Lage, Hogaak, Uro, or Batterskull. They do play Brazen Borrower, Submerge and Unholy Heat so this does not work every time. I still try to win with Marit Lage in most of my Delver games but timing is key.
• Cheese a win. There are some cards like Choke or Chalice of the Void that attack their entire Tempo core. These cards can win you the game if you manage to land them on an empty board. Current iterations of UR Delver are extra weak to graveyard hate so something like Rest in Peace or Unlicensed Hearse can also cheese out a win. This strategy only works if you get it online early as once they get onto the board your cheese card will be mostly useless. It’s still a good strategy though, and I would say that Choke wins me 30%-40% of the post sideboard games vs UR Delver. 
• Answer all their creatures and draw more cards than them. This is the classic Control vs Tempo plan. In my experience this is much better in game 1. I remember playing Snowko and crushing Delver in game 1 just to lose to their “hard to answer” threats like Klothys in game 2 and game 3. Don’t get tricked into thinking that your Delver matchup is good just because you win a long and grindy game 1. 

The final thing that I want to say about the Tempo archetype is that as a non-blue Midrange player you want Delver to be the best deck in the format. This is because Delver will push down the amount of combo decks that you will face in the winner’s meta. If WoTC took out the large banhammer and wiped Tempo out as an archetype then I think we would get a meta of blue Control / Soup decks vs Combo. I prefer the meta that we have now from a competitive Lands player’s perspective. If you want to learn more about the Lands vs Delver matchup you can read this deep dive that I wrote a few years ago.

Summary

In this article I have discussed the major Legacy archetypes and their strengths and weaknesses. But there is a lot of room for maneuver inside each archetype. In fact most top tier decks in Legacy can be built to beat any of the other top decks. You have access to an enormous cardpool and you can often find the tools that you need to make your deck favored in any given matchup. 

The issue is that you cannot build your deck to consistently beat all other top decks at the same time. Fifteen sideboard cards are not enough for you to do this. You will have to make sacrifices and concede (accept that you are below 40%) in certain matchups. You should also not try to be 100% in any matchup as this is impossible in a game with variance such as MTG. If you don’t accept that you can lose some amount of games vs all matchups then you will waste sideboard slots vs your already good matchups. I try to build my deck so that I win the games where both players have an average draw or where both players have a good draw. If this is already the case then I would be hesitant to dedicate more slots for a given matchup as these slots can be better used to improve my bad matchups. 

Finally, I prefer sideboard cards that have a broad utility such as Sphere of Resistance. Sphere may not be a 10 in any matchup (outside Storm) but it’s a 7 in many matchups and this will improve my winrate across the board. Sideboard bombs can be very effective but they are often narrow. I therefore prefer bombs that I can tutor for such as 1 mana artifacts or lands.

If you want to get more of my content then checkout my linktr.ee. Thanks for reading!

Introduction

Many months ago I launched Season 2 of the Competitive Lands Project by formulating a dream to qualify for the Legacy Showcase Qualifier in June. This would be achieved if I managed to Top 8 in either of the March or April Showcase Challenges or if I would go 5-0 in one of the Last Chance Prelims. In order to maximize my chances to realize this dream I put up a list of strategic, gameplay and mental goals for myself. You have been able to follow the preparations on my YouTube Channel. I have intended to write this summary report for months but the fantastic Danish summer weather kind of got in the way. 

It turns out that the Legacy metagame has changed during the summer as a few red decks (Moon Stompy and Painter) have entered the winner’s meta. UR Delver has also declined from the winner’s meta (see table below). In order to keep this article relevant I have added a final section where I give you an updated sideboard guide as well as the decklist that I recommend for the Legacy Super Qualifier tomorrow (3rd of September). 

Thanks for reading!

Archetype	Metashare (Aug 22)	Metashare (Jun 22)	Change
Delver	18%	28%	-10%
Control	17%	16%	+1%
Karn	16%	12%	+4%
Tribal	15%	13%	+2%
Depths	8%	8%	0%
Dark Ritual	7%	8%	-1%
Graveyard	6%	5%	+1%
Show & Tell	6%	4%	+2%

Goals Checklist

First things first. Season 2 is over and it’s time to evaluate my progress. As I explained in the introduction video I would need a fair amount of luck in order to realize the dream that I had formulated and hence when evaluating Season 2 it’s not meaningful to look at the outcome of my dream. It is more meaningful to evaluate if I managed to complete the goals that I set out for myself.

Strategy Goals

In order to get an edge over the field I wanted to first have a good estimate of what “the field” was, and then I wanted to know my macro role(s) against the top decks. This led me to define the following strategic goals. 

Strategic Goal 1: Estimate the winner’s meta prior to the tournament 

I completed this goal. I started by creating a spreadsheet to keep track of the winner’s meta, and I then spent every Monday filling in the winning decks from last weekend’s Challenges. I usually define the winner’s meta as the Top 32 but this time the size of the tournaments were very different (some Saturday Challenges had 60+ players and some PTQ’s had 200+ players) so I decided to make a cut-off based on winning records instead. 

So what was the winner’s meta? Up until the March Showcase Challenge the winner’s meta was UR Delver, Jeskai Hullbreacher, Uro Tradebinder, Death & Taxes, GW Depths, Lands, Doomsday, Reanimator, and 8 Cast. This was a fantastic meta for Lands as Endurance was great against both combo decks in the format. Endurance was also really strong vs Delver, GW Depths and in the mirror. 

After the March Showcase Challenge we started seeing a resurgence in Storm based combo decks and a drop in Doomsday. Unfortunately the Storm decks didn’t completely take over the combo portion of the meta and we instead had Storm, Reanimator, Show & Tell and Doomsday with basically the same metashare. I don’t think it’s possible to build a Lands 75 that can beat all those decks and I had to make sacrifices.

Strategic Goal 2: Have a decklist and sideboard that is tuned for the winner’s meta.

I discussed my strategy for choosing a decklist in one of the first episodes of the season. I initially tried various 3 color decklists but I decided to focus on the more consistent RG shell that would allow me to put 3 copies of Rishadan Port into my manabase. Rishadan Port was primarily there to combat the fact that Jeskai (with a basic heavy manabase) was the premier control deck of the format. I teamed up with Jordy, who is an excellent Lands player from the Netherlands (also his nickname in Discord), and you can see our discussions in this video. I would say that I completed this goal.

Strategic Goal 3: Know the macro strategy for all big matchups (>5% metashare)

I did complete this goal, and it was kind of a no-brainer that I would, given that I have several thousand reps with Lands. But I did something extra this year as I actually wrote down my key strategic notes on paper (see the guide further down in this article).

Gameplay Goals

In order to maximize my chances to play tight, and to make good in-game decisions, I defined the following gameplay related goals.

Gameplay Goal 1: Practice all big matchups (>5% metashare)

I completed this goal by either playing in Legacy prelims or by doing dedicated matchup training. You can see my practice rounds below.

Delver

There are numerous videos of me playing vs Delver on my channel. Here are a few ones from Season 2 of Competitive Lands.

• Competitive Lands – E11 – R1 – UR Delver Erik157751.
• Competitive Lands – E11 – R4 – UR Delver – MaxMagicer.
• Competitive Lands – E23 – R4 – UR Delver – MarcoAO.

Jeskai Control

• Dedicated training with Ye Hua.

GW Depths

• Dedicated training with Dougal Warby.

Doomsday

• Dedicated training with Martin Nielsen.

8 Cast

• Dedicated training with Philip Neoshinji.

Gameplay Goal 2: Be conscious about when to play using intuition and when to stop up and think

I had identified, already prior to the start of Season 2, that I had started to play more and more on autopilot. This is an easy trap to fall into when playing a deck that you have a ton of reps with. I therefore set up a goal to get better at “stop up and think before making plays”. I discussed this with Jarvis Yu during our coaching session and he taught me the following method that would force my brain to stop up and think. After each drawstep (or everytime that my opponent makes a play) I will say the following questions out loud:

• What has changed?
• How do I win from here?
• How do I lose from here?

Gameplay Goal 3: Do a coaching session with Jarvis Yu

Jarvis is one of the best Lands players on the planet, and he also has an incredible range since he plays many other decks and formats. I contacted him in the beginning of Season 2 of Competitive Lands and asked for a coaching session where we would review some of my matches. Jarvis taught me the “stop up and think” strategy explained above but he also identified that I have a tendency to underestimate my opponents. I sometimes choose suboptimal lines in order to give my opponent the chance to mess up and this is clearly not a great strategy when playing against killer opponents (as you will do in a Showcase Challenge). I liked the session with Jarvis so much that I decided to do a similar one with Jordy from the Lands Discord.

Mental Goals

In order to ensure that I would have the stamina to play well at the end of a long tournament I defined the following mental goals for myself. 

Mental Goal 1: Get regular exercise during Season 2 of Competitive Lands.

I set out a goal to run at least once per week and I did achieve this goal. In fact I exercised more than 2 times per week. I did not only run, I also did some fun exercises with my kids such as ice skating and parkour.

Mental Goal 2: Ensure that my tournament weekends are not filled with mentally exhausting activities. 

I completed this goal. I had talked to Camilla well in advance and we ensured that the Showcase weekends were free. She is very supportive and I am lucky to have such an understanding wife.

Mental Goal 3: Don’t practice too much.

I felt a bit exhausted in the middle of Season 2 and I therefore decided to take a 1 week break from playing magic. This really paid off as I started to feel fresh again. I think this goal is one of the most important to have because it is super easy to fall into bad habits when playing magic online. 

Gameplay

So how did it go? I played in 4 qualification tournaments and you can find a quick writeup of the events below.

Practice Round – March Showcase Challenge

I started the day by taking a run so that I would feel fresh for the tournament. Unfortunately I got a pretty big headache after the run (I think I ran too fast / long and got dehydrated). I took various painkillers but the headache didn’t really stop before round 4 or 5 of the Showcase Challenge. I went 6-2 in the tournament which is a great result but not quite good enough for Top 8. I would have had to go 7-1 (or have had better breakers) in order to make it. I lost to Doomsday (round 1) and Blue-Zenith. I won against 3xUR Delver, Madness, Moon Stompy, and GW Depths. I actually misplayed in G3 vs Doomsday and I could have won if I had cropped for Rishadan Port in the upkeep of my opponent’s last turn. I realized this immediately after the match and luckily I did not tilt. Instead I started to play better and better the longer the tournament went on (likely thanks to having achieved my mental goals stated above).

The Tournament – June Showcase Challenge

This was the big event that I had prepared so hard for. I felt great going into the tournament. I knew exactly what to do vs all common matchups and I felt almost unbeatable. I went 7-2 in the tournament which again is a great result but it was not quite good enough for Top 8. I would have had to go 8-1 (or have had better breakers) in order to make it. I lost to GW Depths (round 1) and Reanimator. I won against 3xUR Delver, RUG Delver, Reanimator, 8 Cast and Jeskai Control. My round 1 was interesting because I actually won G1 but I only had 1-2 minutes left on the clock at this time. My opponent had 3-4 minutes left on their clock and they removed all stops for the rest of the game. I timed out in G2. This was annoying because I was actually ahead of the clock for most of G1 but, as the boardstate swung back and forth, I lost track of my clock and started falling behind. This is something concrete that I can improve and I take this lesson away with me. I also did not tilt after round 1 and continued to play tight for the rest of the tournament. My loss vs Reanimator was pretty heartbreaking as I had both Endurance and Surgical in my G3 opener but my opponent cast turn 1 Show and Tell into Archon. This taught me that no matter how much hate I bring in I cannot beat the best hands from Reanimator so it’s likely better to use some sideboard slots for other matchups (and I started cutting Surgical from my sideboard after this tournament). 

Monday – Last Chance Prelim

I started 4-0 (winning against Goblins, Cephalid Breakfast, UR Delver and Blue-Zenith) and I played against Jankyb in the last deciding round. I had googled Jankyb and I saw that they usually play Jeskai Control. I kept a hand with Urza’s Saga and Thespian’s Stage (super good vs Jeskai Control). I also have a Pithing Needle that I played out on turn 1 (as my mana would be clogged up for the remaining turns). I named Flooded Strand with my Pithing Needle. My idea was to possibly mise a win, and even if I miss on Pithing Needle my Thespian’s Stage copying Saga would likely do the trick. It turns out that my opponent was not on Jeskai Control but on UR Delver and I go ahead and lose G1. It’s possible that it was too risky to blind name Flooded Strand with Needle but I stand by that play. I always google my opponent’s in high stake tournaments and it usually pays off as most players stick to the same deck for high stake events. In G2 my hand is clunky and I lose to Delver, Wasteland and Daze. It was heartbreaking to lose the “win and in” to a good matchup but this happens sometimes.

Wednesday – Last Chance Prelim

I went 0-1 drop losing to UR Delver again. My brain was not really turned on at this event and I felt a bit exhausted after playing a lot of high stake magic for several days in a row.

Final Reflections from Season 2 of Competitive Lands

Alright, time to sum up. I did complete all the goals that I had set out, and I did give myself the best chances to realize my dream and qualify for the Showcase Qualifier. I came very close but I didn’t quite get there. This is totally OK though. As I explained in the intro article you need a fair amount of luck in order to qualify for these tournaments and I came up just short a few times in a row. I had a fantastic run overall and it was not only me that did well with Lands in this Season. Lands was the most successful deck in the June Showcase Challenge and we got several pilots into the Showcase Qualifier. I feel proud to have contributed to this success, and it was fantastic to hang out in the Lands Discord and cheer for my fellow players as we competed in these Showcase Challenges.

Legacy Super Qualifier

Decklist

There is a Legacy Super Qualifier on MODO tomorrow (Saturday 3rd of September). I will play in this tournament and here is my decklist and preparation notes. Let’s start with the list and how it differs from what I played in Season 2 of Competitive Lands. If you look at the online winner’s meta (see the table in the introduction of this article) you can see that it has changed a little bit since June. Most importantly Moon Stompy has gone from almost non-existent to (in my opinion) the 2nd best deck in the format. This is not great for Lands as it’s a hard matchup but it’s not completely unbeatable. I think that a card like Hydroblast is pretty well positioned in the meta as it answers most stuff from Moon Stompy (and Painter) and it also answers all hate cards out of the fair blue decks (Price of Progress, Meltdown and Ruination). Finally, it answers the new planeswalker Minsc & Boo. I recently went 4-0 in a prelim with this RUG Lands list that plays Hydroblast in the sideboard. I think this shell has potential but I still believe that RG Lands is the best version for the Legacy Super Qualifier. 

UR Delver, Elves, Reanimator, Jeskai Control, GW Depths, Blue-Zenith, Sneak & Show, Moon Stompy, Death & Taxes and 8 Cast have all had above 5% of the winner’s metashare in August. I think UR Delver, Reanimator and Moon Stompy will be overrepresented in the Super Qualifier as these decks tend to attract online grinders from other formats (Delver because it’s the best deck and the others because they are very powerful and proactive strategies). I think Blue-Zenith and GW Depths are the decks that best exploit Minsc & Boo so these might also increase a bit (if people are able to get their hands on the card). 

So where does this leave me? I will play this list.

How does this differ from the version(s) that I played in Season 2 of Competitive Lands? 

• 0 Elvish Reclaimer, 3 Depths (I used to play 2 Reclaimer and 2 Depths). This is a direct result of Moon Stompy. I really want 3 Depths vs this deck as it’s important to naturally draw it. They play Chalice of the Void and Fury so Reclaimer is unreliable.
• 1 Soul-Guide Lantern (this used to be 1 Pyrite Spellbomb). I want a combination of spell and permanent based hate vs Reanimator, and when I don’t play Reclaimer I want another Saga target and Soul-Guide Lantern is the best one.
• 2 Lightning Bolts in the sideboard (this used to be additional Storm hate). I really want 4 answers to Magus of the Moon post sideboard. I thought about playing Pyroclasm as it’s one of a few cards that can catch up vs Goblin Rabblemaster and it can also answer 2 Maguses but I think Lightning Bolt is better because it can also answer Minsc & Boo and Ramunap Excavator from GW Depths and Blue-Zenith.

Strategy and Sideboarding

UR Delver

My Role: Prison-Combo-Aggro

How do I win?

• Marit Lage (play around Brazen Borrower and Submerge).
• Wasteland lock (this happens less often than you think).
• Endurance and Constructs + Shadowspear (this strategy is much better in G1).

How do I lose?

• Brasen Borrower or Submerge on Marit Lage.
• Murktide plus Wasteland on my Maze of Ith (Pithing Needle on Wasteland can be good).
• Dragon’s Rage Channeler and Expressive Iterations can sometimes grind me to pieces.
• Multiple 1 drops can sometimes run me over.

In	Out
+3 Blasts	-1 Karakas
+2 Choke	-3 Urza’s Saga
+2 Lightning Bolt	-1 Pithing Needle
	-1 Soul-Guide Lantern
	-1 Shadowspear

Elves

My Role: Prison-Combo-Control.

How do I win?

• Super-fast Marit Lage (watch out for Boseiju and sometimes Run Afoul).
• Early disruption and semi-fast Marit Lage.
• Tabernacle + Wasteland + Sphere of Resistance.
• Destroying all their creatures with Punishing Fire (this happens less often than you think).

How do I lose?

• Natural Order into Progenitus.
• Their bigger creatures like Endurance.
• Explosive Glimpse turns. 

In	Out
+2 Lightning Bolt	-1 Karakas
+4 Sphere of Resistance	-2 Urza’s Saga
	-1 Soul-Guide Lantern
	-2 Endurance

Reanimator

My Role: Control-Prison.

How do I win?

• I overload them with answers. I need a mix of spell based and permanent based hate. They will 3 for 1 themselves when trying to go off so we win the card advantage game in this matchup.

How do I lose?

• Their nut-draws.
• Not having enough turn 0 disruption.
• Show and Tell (attack their mana after stopping their first attempt).

In	Out
+1 Thran Foundry	-1 Blast Zone
+4 Sphere of Resistance	-1 Tabernacle
	-1 Shadowspear
	-2 Punishing Fire

Jeskai Control

My Role: Prison-Aggro

How do I win?

• Run them over with Constructs.
• Tap all their Plains and make a Marit Lage at their end step.
• Grind them down with Urza’s Saga and Thespian’s Stage.
• They lose by timing out (this is the most common way that I win).

How do I lose?

• Games go long and I draw too many Mox Diamonds and Explorations.
• Tempo:
  • I have a slow hand and T3feri bounces my Urza’s Saga and then I get Mind Twisted before I have played out my lands.
  • Prismatic Ending destroys Mox Diamond and then I get Mind Twisted before I have played out my lands.
• Their hate cards such as Ruination and Blood Moon.
• Their bombs such as Monastery Mentor, Jace the Mindsculptor or Shark Typhoon.

Note: If I suspect Blood Moon then I might take out 2 Crop Rotations for 2 Force of Vigor.

In	Out
+3 Blasts	-1 Karakas
+2 Choke	-1 Tabernacle
+4 Sphere of Resistance	-1 Dark Depths
+1 Lightning Bolt	-1 Exploration
	-1 Mox Diamond
	-1 Shadowspear
	-1 Soul-Guide Lantern
	-3 Endurance

GW Depths

My Role: Prison-Aggro.

How do I win?

• Run them over with Constructs (try to maximize Urza’s Saga every turn).
• I destroy all their creatures with Punishing Fire.
• They don’t draw enough lands and I have multiple copies of Wasteland and Rishadan Port as well as Tabernacle.
• Marit Lage can win at any time where they tap out without an active Knight (this is very unlikely to happen against a good player).

How do I lose?

• They get onto the board faster than me. This will often result in one of the following boardstates that I can’t really beat:
  • Ramunap Excavator plus Wasteland.
  • Knight of the Reliquary plus Wasteland (Endurance is a good answer to Knight).
• Force of Vigor. This card is often a total blow out and it’s very hard to play around.

In	Out
+2 Lightning Bolt	-2 Dark Depths
+2 Force of Vigor	-1 Yavimaya, Cradle of Growth
	-1 Shadowspear

Blue-Zenith

My Role: Prison-Aggro.

How do I win?

• Run them over with Constructs (try to maximize Urza’s Saga every turn).
• They don’t draw enough lands and I have multiple copies of Wasteland and Rishadan Port as well as Tabernacle.
• A fast Marit Lage can sometimes do the trick as they play 80 cards and might not always have Swords to Plowshares.
• I manage to grind them down with Thespian’s Stage copying an Urza’s Saga.
• They lose by timing out (this is less common vs Blue-Zenith compared to Jeskai Control as their clock is faster).

How do I lose?

• They manage to assemble Ramunap Excavator plus Wasteland.
• They ramp (with Uro or Ramunap plus fetches) into Primetime.
• Games go long and I draw too many Mox Diamonds and Explorations.

In	Out
+2 Lightning Bolt	-1 Dark Depths
+2 Pyroblast or Sphere	-1 Yavimaya, Cradle of Growth
	-1 Exploration
	-1 Mox Diamond

Sneak & Show

My Role: Prison-Aggro-Combo.

How do I win?

• Super fast Marit Lage (this is the only way to win G1).
• Neither player is casting spells and I attack with 5/5 constructs (Sphere + Saga).
• Early disruption (Sphere of Resistance) plus semi-fast Marit Lage.
• I manage to mess them up in the middle of their combo. For example if they cast Show and Tell then I can put in Sphere of Resistance and destroy Omniscience with Boseiju / Force of Vigor before they can cast another spell.
• Choke.

How do I lose?

• Their nut-draws (cannot really beat that).
• Magus of the Moon (they no longer play Blood Moon).
• Not finding enough disruption (Sphere and Blasts are MVP’s). 

In	Out
+3 Blasts	-1 Tabernacle
+4 Sphere of Resistance	-2 Maze
+3 Force of Vigor	-1 Bog
+2 Choke	-1 Blast Zone
+2 Lightning Bolt	-3 Endurance
	-1 Shadowspear
	-1 Soul-Guide Lantern
	-1 Punishing Fire
	-1 Exploration
	-2 Life from the Loam

Moon Stompy

My Role: Combo.

How do I win?

• I have Dark Depths plus a timely answer to Blood Moon / Magus of the Moon.
• They mulligan to oblivion.

How do I lose?

• I don’t draw Dark Depths.
• I happen to draw the wrong answer to their lockpiece (Force of Vigor vs Magus of the Moon or Punishing Fire vs Blood Moon).
• Karn the great creator (if they play him).
• They don’t play out their Moons and instead run me over with goblins.

In	Out
+2 Lightning Bolt	-1 Bojuka Bog
+3 Force of Vigor	-2 Urza’s Saga
	-1 Karakas
	-1 Soul-Guide Lantern

Death & Taxes

My role: Prison-Aggro-Control

How do I win?

• Run them over with Constructs (try to maximize Urza’s Saga every turn).
• Destroy all their creatures with Punishing Fire.
• They don’t draw enough lands and I have multiple copies of Wasteland and Rishadan Port as well as Tabernacle.
• Marit Lage can sometimes win but it’s super risky as they have Swords to Plowshares and Solitude.

How do I lose?

• They have a turn 2 Stoneforge Mystic into Kaldra Compleat.
• They land an early Sanctum’s Prelate and name 2.
• My hand is not functioning (mull to 5) and they run me over with dorks.

Notes: I might bring in two Sphere of Resistance on the play.

In	Out
+3 Force of Vigor	-1 Bog
+2 Lightning Bolt	-1 Dark Depths
	-1 Soul-Guide Lantern
	-2 Endurance

8 Cast

My Role: Prison-Control-Combo

How do I win?

• I kill their first creature and then Wasteland them to oblivion. Urza’s Saga comes down once we have stabilized the board.
• Fast Marit Lage. It is risky to go for a slow Marit Lage as they have 2 Otawara, 1 Spellbomb and sometimes Brazen Borrower (post sideboard).

How do I lost?

• Their nut-draws (cannot really beat that).
• My hand lining up poorly against theirs:
  • I have 1 drops and they have Chalice.
  • I have Blasts and they have Urza’s Saga.
  • I have Wasteland plus Force of Vigor and they have Emry or Sai.
• They can sometimes grind me out thanks to Thoughtcast and Crucible of Worlds. But I often feel favored going long as long as I am able to control their early board.

Note: Kappa Cannoneer is more like Tangle Wire than True-Name Nemesis. Once we reach 5-6 mana we have plenty of answers in Maze of Ith and Boseiju. I only die to Kappa if it lands early or if they have 2 copies. 

In	Out
+3 Blasts	-1 Dark Depths
+3 Force of Vigor	-1 Urza’s Saga
+1 Lightning Bolt	-3 Endurance
	-1 Soul-Guide Lantern
	-1 Crop Rotation