[Primer] The Windfall Crucible: A Gitrog Tale (Commander / EDH MTG Deck)

[Primer] The Windfall Crucible: A Gitrog Tale

Commander / EDH BRG (Jund) Land Destruction Landfall Lands Tokens

LandoLRodriguez

Land (42)

Creature (28)

Planeswalker (4)

Artifact (4)

Commander (1)

Sorcery (8)

Instant (7)

Enchantment (6)

Maybeboard

Creature (8)

The Windfall Crucible: A Gitrog Tale

My Lord Windgrace commander/EDH deck. The core philosophy is this: there is absolutely nothing in Magic that can stop you from playing lands. No matter what preposterous $#i+ your opponents are doing during the game, you're going to get to play at least 1 land on your turn. Our goal will be to make each and every one of those lands entering (and often times leaving) the battlefield become a meaningful act; to create an engine that can generate the absolute maximum amount of value.

Below you will find my primer, detailing how we will accomplish this - something this deck has proven itself quite consistently able to do. There will be at least a brief discussion of every card in the deck as to the rationale of what it's doing in here. So, the first question I always like to answer is:

Why Lord Windgrace, you ask?

Shortly after I returned to Magic after a very long sabbatical, while both the Battle For Zendikar and Amonkhet blocks were legal, I made a standard deck that looked to exploit landfall from BFZ and OGW with Ramunap Excavator. That deck turned out to be one of the most fun-to-play decks I ever put together and quickly made landfall one of my favorite abilities. That deck of course included The Gitrog Monster, as well as Mina and Denn, Wildborn to maximize my land drops per turn.

Fast forward a few years to when it finally occurs to me to make a landfall commander deck, and I at least know that I'm going to want to be Jund to replicate my standard deck. Turns out that right around that same time, the Lord Windgrace pre-con was being released. A Jund commander that cares about lands, when no other commander in those colors seemed to? It was almost like WoTC was printing him just for me.

And so it came to be, that Windgrace would be my commander. He of course comes with the downside of being a planeswalker, so we will never finish off an opponent with commander damage playing him. In my experience though, commander damage very seldom winds up being a factor. He also came with the upside of having a starting point as far as deck building is concerned, although only 9 non-land cards from that pre-con remain in the deck. What we have instead is a value engine that has a pretty good chance of winning any game its in. More than most other decks, that chance begins and ends with:

The Lands

With this deck being what it is, of course the lands themselves hold quite an importance. We're running 42 lands, considerably (and understandably) more than most of my commander decks. While the deck skews well towards , the mana base is much closer to balanced between all 3 colors. Since we'll be leaning heavily on fetch lands, color fixing has never proven to be an issue. A breakdown of the lands is as follows:

Mana

It should come as no surprise that the majority of lands are for the purpose of generating mana. These lands fall into these categories:

Mono Show

Dual Show

Show

Fetch

The fetch lands in this deck are going to wind up performing a crucial role. Not only will they do their normal job of both mana fixing and deck thinning, but they will also add more value by going to the graveyard, and should help us maximize our land drops once a crucible effect is in play. More on that in a little bit. The fetches fall into 3 categories:

Basic Show

Old School Show

Modern Show

Utility

These lands, while they often tap for mana, also provide some other sort of use (in case you weren't aware of what "utility" means). They include:

Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth & Yavimaya, Cradle of Growth turn all lands into either Swamps or Forests, respectively. While this means that they (and all other) lands can tap for either or , having every land be one of these types will interact nicely with some of our other cards.
Petrified Field. While recurring lands from the graveyard straight to the battlefield is a focus of this deck, there's plenty of other situations where getting it into hand is more desireable. That's where this card shines. If we need something to feed Lord Windgrace's +2, grab a cycling land for extra draw with Gitrog around, retrace a spell with Wrenn and Six's emblem, and more, Petrified Field is invaluable.
Boseiju, Who Endures made its value apparent the very first game after it got slotted in. In a deck with very little artifact and enchantment removal otherwise, this card is a workhorse. With 10 legendary creatures in the deck, it often gets this job done for only as well. With multiple land drops and Petrified Field available, it can do so several times a turn if needed. This card quickly became an all-star.
Volrath's Stronghold because while getting lands back should be fairly easy, the same is not quite as true with creatures. Volrath's makes this possible in the form of a land (which we have several options of searching the deck for). This makes losing an important creature a little less painful.
Field of the Dead has the potential for getting absolutely silly in this deck. We should be to 7 different lands pretty quickly (the snow-covered lands are included as a zero-downside way to enable this slightly sooner), and while we're dropping lots of lands each turn, this will churn out an army of zombies in short order. We aim to highlight why this card was rightfully banned in several formats.

Land Destruction

While land destruction is not meant to be a focus of this deck, we do have the means of doing so fairly effectively. People really seem to not like it when you start blowing up their lands, and this deck tends to turn the rest of the table against us without doing so anyway. So the land destruction subtheme is mostly to either get rid of individually problematic lands (I'm looking at you, Maze of Ith) or as a late game strategy to cripple an opponent when we're heads up. Here's how we do so:

Wasteland can blow up lands quite efficiently. Assuming we have multiple land drops available and a crucible effect in play, we can chew through an opponent's mana base pretty well.
Finally, Strip Mine is the ultimate land destroyer. Under the same condition described under Wasteland, Strip Mine can eat up all of the lands, including basics. One turn late game can force some salty scooping with strategic mana base removal. This one is all the land destruction we'll really need.

The Engine

Now that we're familiar with the lands, let's examine how that fuel will power value generation. This is accomplished through 2 means:

First, we want as many lands as possible to enter play each turn. We are of course allowed one normally, so we want as many effects as possible that will let us play more.

Since we'll probably run out of lands in our hand pretty quickly with this strategy, the second half of the engine is being able to play lands from our graveyard. This is something I have been and will continue to refer to as a "crucible effect", for reasons that are probably obvious to you already and soon will be if not. Here's a closer look at how we create these conditions:

Extra Lands

I will separate our means of getting extra land drops each turn into 2 categories. The first, what I refer to as "Natural" land drops, are cards that simply allow us to play lands each turn in addition to our one normal land drop. The second category is cards that will put lands onto the battlefield with a spell or activated ability.

Natural Show

Ability Show

Crucibles

We'll never be able to keep our hand stocked with enough lands to use all of the land drops we're allowed on our turn. With all of the fetch lands we'll be leaning on, as well as various spells and abilities that send lands to our graveyard, it's imperative to our game plan that we're able to use the lands in the graveyard. There's only 3 cards in all of Magic that will allow this:

Crucible of Worlds is the original, and thus lends its name to the effect that appears on the other two.
Ramunap Excavator does the same job at the same CMC tier, but attached to a body. While this does make it slightly easier to get rid of, it also makes it easier to find with creature tutoring and recursion effects.
Ancient Greenwarden brings the crucible effect attached to an even bigger body that can also swat down fliers. More importantly, it also acts as a "Landharmonicon" and doubles all of our landfall triggers. This can generate an overwhelming amount of value and ratchets up our gameplan from dangerous to lethal.

While having 3 redundant crucible effects - two of which are tutorable as creatures - means that we should be able to get that going most games, the following cards can also get lands into our hand in order to maximize our land drops in the absence of a crucible:

Lands to Hand Show

The Value

So now we've covered our fuel, and our engine which it will stoke. All that's left is to make all these land drops mean something. Naturally this deck is loaded with tools to do that. Additionally, we have some tools that generate value from lands going to graveyard, as well as some means to make that happen reliably. Here's how all that breaks down:

Landfall

Here's all the cards that have a triggered ability when a land enters (whether or not they have the "landfall" keyword included), roughly sorted by the type of effect:

Land Death

As previously alluded to, we are not only interested in lands entering the battlefield. We also have some cards that generate value when lands head to the graveyard - something we intend to make happen quite frequently. Those cards are:

The Gitrog Monster draws us a card any time one more lands head to the graveyard. Again, TGM's value can't be understated and will be explored at length soon.
Turntimber Sower makes a humble plant whenever lands head to the graveyard. This guy can grow quite a garden as the game moves along, and given the plant interaction with AoZ and Phylath, that garden can explode. Furthermore, this is our only creature sac outlet. We're not depending much on death triggers, but it's nice to have a way to hatch Nesting Dragon eggs or to piss off Angry Omnath when we want to.
Titania, Protector of Argoth has the drawback of only caring when a land goes to the graveyard from the battlefield. Considering that she makes a 5/3 when that happens, I suppose we can forgive her.

While we should be sending plenty of lands to the graveyard with fetch lands alone, we have also included several cards that function as land sac outlets so we can get desired land death effects on demand. They all have the upside of not having an additional cost to sac the land.

Land Sac Outlets Show

The Gitrog Monster

Since this handsome fellow does enough in this deck to merit his own section, let's take a moment now to appreciate

If anyone has actually read through this whole thing to this point, they probably would have noticed that this guy appears in almost every section. He affects the game so much that the deck feels like it's playing completely differently when he's in play.

While most of this is a result of his card drawing ability, the fact that he also carries one of our core abilities (an extra land drop) and triggers his draw ability himself once per turn truly makes him the horror that he's labeled as. All of this doesn't even take into consideration that he's a 6/6 with deathtouch. Here's a list of some of his most notable interactions:

Every use of a fetch land draws a card.
Cycling a land draws 2 cards.
Pitching a land to Windgrace's +2 draws 3 cards.
Channeling Boseiju draws a card.
Strip Mining away lands draws a card each use.
Adds a cantrip to Cultivate, Scapeshift, Crop Rotation, Harrow, & Realms Uncharted.
Dredging for Life from the Loam has a decent chance of drawing a card.
In cases where we're holding more than 7 cards at the end step, our favorite froggy lets us discard lands as long as we have them until we draw something we want. Unless of course we've fired Wrenn and Seven's -8.

Long story short: froggy is a draw machine, and a highly effective one. Once we get going with him, odds are we'll find what we need to take the game over. Make no mistake: if he were the correct colors, he'd be our commander. Although we're not running very much , the cards we are (Especially Mina & Denn, Omnath, and W+6) make it worth it. Thus, Gitrog is relegated to the 99. He is often the first target of creature tutoring, and he remains one of my favorite cards in Magic.

The Utility

There's certain things that every good commander deck should be able to do at least a little of. Those things include ramping and drawing cards, which both factor heavily into our overall game plan. This section includes the other things decks need to do that don't happen on their own with our value engine. Those cards fall into the following categories:

Tutors

These are the cards that will rifle through the library to grab what we need, separated into ones that can only search lands we want and ones that can grab non-lands (sometimes in addition to lands).

Lands Show

Other Show

Recursion

There's nothing worse than sending a card you want to the graveyard before its time. Well, I guess exile is worse, but there's no coming back from that usually. The following cards can retrieve something we want from the graveyard, again separated by pure land recursion (ignoring our crucibles, which actually allow us to play lands from the graveyard) and other types.

Lands Show

Other Show

Protection

Recursion won't be necessary of course if we can manage to prevent things going to the graveyard in the first place. Here's some cards included to make sure our stuff makes it into play and stays there.

Vexing Shusher is a great control deck spoiler.
Sylvan Safekeeper is great not only as a land sac outlet, but also to shroud our favorite creatures from our opponents' malevolence.
Heroic Intervention is great to spoil board wipes. Screw you, Blasphemous Act.

Removal

This is something I typically like to include more of in a commander deck, but more than more others, this deck is meant to overwhelm our opponents and make it not matter so much what they have. Nevertheless, there will inevitably be some stuff that will disrupt our gameplan and needs to get gone. We have a few options for those things here.

Lavalanche functions as the only sweeper we have in the deck. It does have the drawback of only hitting all creatures one opponents controls, but still is very useful when one player starts pumping out a ton of creatures.
Windgrace's Judgment can get rid of one of any permanent for each opponent. Definitely tips the scales in our favor in a close game.
Boseiju, Who Endures has already been mentioned more than once, but is worth discussing again. We have no other way of repeatably getting rid of troublesome enchantments and artifacts, and Boseiju has filled that role like an all-star. Even though doing so requires multiple lands drops in a turn, a crucible, and Petrified Field, Boseiju can blow up multiple painful effects in a single turn at a very low cost. All of those other pieces are things that should be coming naturally to our game plan and/or can be grabbed with tutors when needed. This is a great card and worth every penny.
Finally, Lord Windgrace's -11 blows up six permanents while unleashing a wave of angry kitties. This is a truly formidable ability (as any planeswalker ult is and should be) and one that the table is pretty terrified of every time Windgrace comes out. Thus, it's a rare thing to be in the position to use it and not something we can really depend on.

Other

Here a few cards that provide a powerful, valuable, and often much-needed ability that don't fit into any of our other categories.

Doubling Season probably requires no introduction. There are 20 other cards in this deck that benefit from its token/counter doubling ability. While generating tokens and/or counters isn't necessarily the focus of our game plan, this will provide plenty enough value to merit its inclusion. Getting Windgrace into play at 10 provides pretty much our only chance to fire his ultimate. Nesting Dragon and Scute Swarm create absurd amounts of tokens when doubled. Mix with Ancient Greenwarden to get into some really preposterous exponential growth territory.
Amulet of Vigor lets us bring in our lands untapped. While just avoiding the pain of shocklands is great, the real value here is when we're using a lot of Evolving Wilds or Terramorphic Expanse. Having lands fetched with those cards available for use right away makes an enormous difference, especially mid to late game when we might be using them several times in one turn.
Elixir of Immortality lets us reset our deck, in a way. As mentioned just above, we should be using fetch lands a lot if the game is going at all to plan. Although 13 basic lands and 19 total lands with basic land types might sound like plenty, we can search them all out of our library in fairly short order. Having no fetchable lands left de-weaponizes our fetch lands and slows down the game plan considerably. With the tools we need to quickly stock the graveyard with fetchable lands, Elixir lets us put them right back into our library and start the fetching shenanigans all over again. Extremely valuable in games that run long.

The End

So now we've explored the bulk of our game plan. The value engine described in the sections above, in most cases, provides plenty of firepower to be able to close games out. What happens though when it's not? Believe it or not, our opponents have their own game plans and their own methods for staying in the game and creating their own desired board states. Here's a few cards included mostly for the purpose of closing out the game when all else hasn't quite gotten us there.

Nylea, God of the Hunt. While being able to create and often pump up our own enormous army of insects or plants or elementals or whatever is great, plenty of other decks are quite capable of creating their own enormous army of chump blockers. Nylea lets us push right through that by not only giving everyone trample, but also allowing us to dump as much mana as we can muster to further pump the team. Given the volume of mana we can make late game, not much will be able to withstand this.
Torment of Hailfire also serves as a great mana sink to finish thigs off. Being a "loss of life" rather than "damage" effect makes it a little harder to circumvent with damage mitigation. Again, given the absurd amount of mana we can make by the time we're ready for it, most players won't have enough permanents or cards in hand to avoid dying to Torment. Some folks will be able to sac/discard enough though, so...
Exsanguinate does pretty much the same thing functionally, but does it a little more to the point. Just leave a little mana open for Vexing Shusher when available.

There you have it, a comprehensive look at how my Windgrace deck wins games. As mentioned in the intro section, winning is something this deck has proven itself capable of doing quite reliably. Although I haven't actually been tracking my stats, I believe this deck has the highest win percentage of all my commander decks and the one I feel I have the best chance with at the start of the game, regardless of what my opponents are playing. It has all the tools to execute our game plan consistently and to answer nearly all threats and disruptions to our game plan. While it does tend to slow the game down a little with all the searching and shuffling required, it also is a blast to play.

Thanks for sticking with me if you've done so to this point. I'll always welcome constructive criticism and suggestions from the community, and please feel free to +1 if you like!

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92% Casual

Competitive

Revision 8 See all

(1 year ago)

+1	Conduit of Worlds	maybe
+1	Titania, Nature's Force	maybe

Top Ranked	Achieved #23 position overall 2 years ago Achieved #15 position in Commander / EDH 2 years ago Achieved #2 position in Commander / EDH Lands 2 years ago
Date added	6 years
Last updated	1 year
Exclude colors	WU
Legality	This deck is Commander / EDH legal.
Rarity (main - side)	19 - 0 Mythic Rares 46 - 0 Rares 14 - 0 Uncommons 8 - 0 Commons
Cards	100
Avg. CMC	3.45
Tokens	Beast 4/4 G, Cat Warrior 2/2 G, City's Blessing, Copy Clone, Dragon 2/2 R, Dragon Egg 0/2 R, Elemental 5/3 G, Elemental 5/5 RG, Elemental X/X G, Emblem Nissa, Vital Force, Emblem Wrenn and Seven, Emblem Wrenn and Six, Insect 1/1 G, Plant 0/1 G, Treefolk / G w/ Reach, Zombie 2/2 B
Folders	cards i may want to buy in the future, inpsiration, Inspiration, New Possibilities
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