This deck is to satisfy my first and most beloved strategy in all of magic: ramp into big green things and hit face as fast as possible. This deck attempts at ramping to 3 or 4 mana by turn 2 in order to drop big stat threats quickly and exhaust our opponent's removal options
Ooga Booga.
This list is meant to be competitive, but is in no way final, and any suggestions will be considered and appreciated. In less simple terms, this deck aims to either ramp alot of mana quickly and to play a bunch of scaling threats. The idea is to consistently be playing threat after threat each turn, whether its a big body or cards that will allow me to ramp to uncontrollable levels of mana to exhaust their answers. In theory, you can withstand aggro decks because your creatures are bigger, and be able to pressure control decks until you can get a big swing turn. This deck is clearly very weak to combo decks as it does not interact with the opponent all that much, but the idea is to target all of the aggro and control decks in the meta.
Cards in the maybeboard have been considered but if you have a good argument or reason for me to include, do not hesitate.
There are some cards that are core to the deck, like
Arbor Elf
and
Utopia Sprawl
, while others are not core and can be changed. I am going to list some of the less core cards here and why I chose them. The sideboard was quickly thrown in - None of the slots there are permanent and thats the section of my deck I feel like needs the most help.
Chancellor of the Tangle
I've always liked this card, and potentially being able to dump out
Arbor Elf
+
Utopia Sprawl
on turn 1 to have a 5 mana turn two is powerful. The body and keywords on this guy are weak otherwise but are passable. However I have a suspicion that this card could be swapped for something cheaper with more utility and more consistency, like
Courser of Kruphix
.
Wistful Selkie
Card draw seems to be really rare in green. That is a large part of why I value this card, and it gives a 2/2 body which is why I picked this over something like
Harmonize
in the main list. This powers up my devotion as well as being a slightly bigger body than something like
Elvish Visionary
.
Leatherback Baloth
This card is mostly there for the big, cheap body and the devotion for
Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx
. A surprisingly powerful threat that can bait removal out before our big swing turns later on in the game. Vanilla creatures with no keywords are usually bad, but a 4/5 for 3? C'mon, thats a beefer.
Garruk Wildspeaker
Garruk is easily my favorite planeswalker, and this card seems absolutely insane in this deck. We have synergy with his +1 and utopia sprawl, his -1 can protect him and getting a 3/3 with him is great value when he comes into play. And his ult is a very strong threat to close out games, although it would be surprising if he is ever allowed to stay alive long enough to get there. I've even considered bumping him up to 3x copies.
Carnage Tyrant
I'm very questionable about this card as its mostly there for the control matchups, but dies to edict effects like
Slippery Bogle
does, and
Liliana of the Veil
is exceptionally popular in modern. The fact it can dodge counterspells and removal while having trample is potentially a great control killer. I still think it might need replacing.
Wall of Roots
Probably the most stable non-core card in this list because of it's ability to protect us against aggro early turns while also being a decent enough mana dork. I've also considered
Sylvan Caryatid
in this slot, but this card doesn't require you to tap it to make mana, making it a valuable blocker.
Kalonian Tusker
This guy is like a worse, cheaper version of
Leatherback Baloth
. He fuels devotion, can block and kill most 1-drops, but he dies to
Lightning Bolt
. I wanted more creatures that could be offensive for when we drop our
Craterhoof Behemoth
.