FEEL FREE TO ADD ME ON ARENA: ApolloPaladin#83413
Premise:
I've been toying with this deck off and on for a couple of months now. It is not quite finished being revamped, but I'm at a point where I think input could be helpful.
One of my main gripes about a Landfall build for competitive play is that it becomes very easy to just "spam-play" a bunch of lands for a big attack to whittle the life total down, and then be stuck with relatively low-power stuff unable to mount decent defense or quite finish off an opponent (or, if they do something unexpected vs a finishing attack).
To try and circumvent this, the general premise of this build is to utilize lands which can be sacrificed in conjunction with Crucible of Worlds to repeat-play them and feed more consistent land plays per turn.
The idea here is to have creatures in play to expand out how many lands can be played per turn, and then if I can get the Crucible out with even 1 "sacrifice-able" land, I can just repeat play/sac it rather than trying to use Sorceries to get multiple triggers. Some of these lands look quite useful, particularly Ghost Quarter which I could just tap/sac over and over and drain all the basic lands of a color from a 2 or 3-color deck. I could completely annihilate anything nonbasic, and I think that could be troublesome for some builds if I can take out a color early enough.
Let me know how you feel about weaponizing the Crucible of Worlds into the Gruul Landfall builds more common to Arena. I think it could make a comeback...
Multi-Land Plays:
The crux of a Landfall build is going to be getting more than 1 in play per turn (reliably if possible). I try to avoid too many Instant/Sorcery effects to achieve this, as unless it's as a finisher, they can leave this build rather vulnerable if an opponent is still standing once they've been played.
- Azusa, Lost but Seeking: The only downside here is that it's a Legend, otherwise great mana cost for the effect.
- Dryad of the Ilysian Grove: Fairly solid, these can remain decent blockers even on opponent's turn, unlike most creatures in this build. These also let me pull colored mana from all of my Non-Basic lands in this deck in dire straits (hasn't been often, but it's there).
- Oracle of Mul Daya: Included a couple of these instead of just doing 4x Dryads, I've found the Library reveal helpful more than once
- Roiling Regrowth: Again, sacrificed Lands aren't really a huge deterrent to this deck. This makes a great follow-up to other Land plays.
Opponent's Turn(s):
Of course it's difficult to mount a significant defense against attacking creatures and/or direct damage since playing lands on an opponent's turn is not really a thing (Roiling Regrowth is an exception to this, partially why it's included). I've also got a couple of cards in here which add counters, instead of the more traditional +2/+2 until end of turn.
- Roaring Earth This is great since it comes into play early and can hit any creature
- Territorial Scythecat Innate Trample ability and continues to pump up similar to Roaring Earth
- Glorious End I think this card is really sneaky, and with how dramatically this deck can ramp up, often times I only need 1 more turn to win. It's essentially a conditional red counterspell too, so it does a good job of preserving the board state for the follow-up turn. There were SO many games in testing where I was only 1 turn away from winning that trying out a copy here felt right.
Card Draw & Support:
Not wanting to rely completely on the Crucible being in play, Card Draw is another excellent way of keeping land plays constant turn after turn. Additionally, I've been finding it beneficial to have a little bit of defense or response against target destroy effects (particularly my Crucibles).
- Crash Through One main drawback to how quickly creatures ramp up is the fact that they have no other innate abilities for the most part.
- Gaea's Blessing Anti-Mill, and also card draw plus salvaging any destroyed nonland permanents back into circulation.
- Tamiyo's Safekeeping For saving my Crucibles primarily, but also works against boardwipe & also targeted removal on creatures that I need for extra Land plays; or good for saving an equipped creature for a swing the following turn.
- Return to Nature Keeps enchantments off my creatures, also useful for sniping Escape and/or Flashback cards from Graveyards.
- Bala Ged Recovery
Nifty for salvaging a destroyed Crucible, or can be used as a Landfall trigger if need be.
The Crucible:
The good ol' Crucible of Worlds is an absolute classic which I don't think sees nearly enough play in current Historic formats on Arena. In practice so far, it has been extremely reliable in firing off land plays each turn. There is so much potential here already after only a few test games. The double-played Sac/Search lands are particularly mean, effectively granting extra land triggers without actually playing any land towards the count.
Here are some of the lands I've been toying with to help exploit the Crucible:
- Lotus Field The sacrifice on this is fairly easily compensated for, I just don't like that it enters tapped. Only running 2 for the moment.
- Fabled Passage Duh. Being able to play out multiples of these is amazing for Landfall triggers.
- Evolving Wilds Not quite the powerhouse of Fabled Passage late-game, but running both with the Crucible helps ensure lots of Landfall triggers.
- Ghost Quarter These can be quite useful against Nonbasic Land-heavy builds. I see a lot of the 'becomes a creature' lands in use, lots of
your Blast Zones, lots of Castle Locthwains, and the like...even if these don't completely shut down mana they can limit an opponent's versatility greatly. Decks which don't maintain at least a 1:1 ratio of Nonbasic to Basic land end up running out of choices after a certain point. With the proper assortment of creatures in play, I've had turns where I take out 3 or even 4 nonbasic lands totally mana-free. Also, for the few games where things have kind of stalemated, I can repeat-play these to gradually filter down even Basic lands leaving the opponent no mana to play anything they draw.
Feedback/Help
I'd be very interested to know if there's an additional combo out there that I'm missing. Most of the creature selection for competitive Landfall is pretty uninspired; the only one I'm really staying away from is Scute Swarm as I think it's just been overplayed. I think that this Crucible-style build could hold up to the more standardized R/G Landfall build, but this is still very much a work in progress.
Ideally I'd like to trim the deck down to 60 cards, but even thus far in testing the ratio hasn't been too much of a problem. Still, if anyone has input on making this a bit more streamline, I'm all ears.
