My take on (non-Bloodbraid) Ponza combining elements of old-school Land Destruction with a newer version of Mono-Green control. It gives you both beater and lock win-cons and doesn't have the inherent vulnerabilities that either version would have alone. The more I play this deck, the more impressed I am with its versatility, particularly with being able to sideboard very effectively against most threats.
The basic elements are pretty much established:
Arbor Elf
,
Utopia Sprawl
and
Birds of Paradise
for ramp with
Stone Rain
,
Mwonvuli Acid-Moss
and
Blood Moon
(or
Trinisphere
) for your basic mana disruption. All of this is designed to give you a significant advantage over your opponent and to allow you to control the tempo of the game, but none of it will win games outright for you.
There are two main paths to victory with this deck - the first is to get an early beater (preferably
Inferno Titan
but
Stormbreath Dragon
is there to dodge
Path to Exile
and ground blockers) and just pound him while he struggles to get his cards into play; the second is to soft-lock your opponent out, most likely using a recursion of
Primal Command
and
Eternal Witness
, which will force him to infinitely top-deck the same card. Everything else in the deck is there to choke off his resources until you get to one option or the other.
To fuel the recursion for the second option, I ultimately chose
Stampeding Serow
over
Temur Sabertooth
, mainly due to Temur's Bolt-able toughness of 3. To give him a little help, I added a pair of
Acidic Slime
which helps with land disruption as well - it's not uncommon for me to have opponents scoop with only
Acidic Slime
and
Stampeding Serow
on the board, and sometimes your best option is to just go get one or the other with
Primal Command
.
Primal Command
is really the key to this deck due to all the tricks you can pull off with it. Your usual use of it will be to grab whichever creature you might need in the moment while bouncing a land to the top of their deck, but it can a lot of other things for you by disrupting graveyard strategies, getting you a chunk of life in a pinch or burying a particularly troublesome non-creature permanent in their deck. The only reason that I don't have four in the deck is that one (or possibly two) in your opening hand is less than ideal.
To fill out the deck I added more removal in 2x
Bramblecrush
, 3x
Bonfire of the Damned
and a
Scavenging Ooze
. I agonize over whether
Beast Within
or
Bramblecrush
is the better option as an early 3/3 can actually be a bit troublesome at times for this deck, so that's something to consider - on the flip side, it's occasionally been invaluable for me to turn an unneeded permanent of my own into a sudden 3/3 blocker. Mana generally isn't an issue with Ponza and often the creatures that concern you the most only have 1 or 2 Toughness, so Bonfire can easily be a game-breaker, whether you miracle it in or have to hard cast it. ScOoze is simply too good of an all-around card not to main deck when you're playing green, and since
Primal Command
makes it fetch-able even just one can still be a very valuable addition.
Chandra, Torch of Defiance
helps you get to eight mana (which is the magic number in this deck), gives you card draw and ultimately a win condition all on its own.
I should point out that I'm carrying a set of
Trinisphere
in the sideboard because it and
Blood Moon
are very different when it comes to the types of decks that they tend to disrupt and yet are easily interchangeable on our card list. Depending on your current meta you might even be better off main-decking the 'spheres and sideboarding the Moons - in one match-up against a Bogle deck I even ran sets of both after pulling out most of my land destruction.
Grafdigger's Cage
is in there to slow down Dredge, Company and a handful of other decks that rely on graveyard or fetch creatures and the rest includes a toolbox of useful creatures to go get with
Primal Command
as needed.
