You would think so, wouldn't you? In fact, both of those cards have seen play in this list even but a few revisions ago. Let me go through my deckbuilding philosophy a little bit (hopefully I'm not repeating myself from other comments too much!) and hopefully be able to explain why those cards got cut.

What is the biggest problem with Sasaya as a commander? Well, to be brutally honest, she's frequently prone to just, you know, not doing anything. Playing Sasaya in a non-competitive EDH setting (competitive has both the cheap interaction and the speed to make Sasaya a non-issue) is like a Shahrazad /Archenemy subgame, where three or so other players need to successfully both deal with you, the combo player, while also hamstringing each other just enough to go on to win afterwards (it's for this reason, I've found, that aggressive decks see their win rates rise massively in games where Sasaya is eliminated) This isn't helped by the deck's lack of interaction or the fact that almost every creature in the deck either sacrifices itself or is more optimal (perhaps even only playable!) during the combo turn. A single discard spell can set you back years as you struggle to find action or the necessary lands to turn on that action in the first place.

To that end, effects like Seek the Horizon look appealing, don't they? Three lands for one card? That's basically Harmonize right there. But the problem with that thinking, as appealing as it may be, is it kind of lives in this fear-ridden headspace that can actively hamper the deck. If there isn't a discard spell, a Seek the Horizon without Reliquary Tower in play generally stops being Harmonize and becomes a bad Sift , or sometimes even worse. But Reliquary Tower, despite how good that sounds, actually kills the deck's consistency for the simple reason of not being named Forest (or Snow-Covered Forest , as the case may be). Instead, I've moved towards grindier, instant-speed engines like Thaumatic Compass  ^Flip and Journeyer's Kite to make up the difference. Is it worse? Maybe, but again, only in scenarios that, while they do exist, are much less frequent than one might think, at least in my meta.

Rites of Spring has that same "Reliquary Tower" problem. For Rite to be good, you need nine cards in hand total: Rites, seven lands-to-be, and a payoff spell. And that's just not feasible, to be honest. In the scenarios that it is, the draw engines this deck has mean that it's very likely those "lands-to-be" are just "lands". And in those scenarios, Rites is just a dead card.

Turn Six has always been the goal for this deck. Three lands to cast Sasaya, and eighteen initial mana to go off with. The rest of the deck is built with that goal in mind. And hey, if your local meta has a lot of discard, then of course Seek the Horizon (and, similarly, Gaea's Blessing ) probably deserves a slot. If you think 53 lands is absurd and could easily be slimmed down, maybe with some more activated ability-based interaction, then Rites of Spring is probably a must-add. But this list has always been aiming for speed first, so they both got cut.

Thanks,

-r

Ack, I just realized I meant Gaea's Bounty , not Blessing. Apologies.

Hi there!

Always nice to find another Sasaya player! This deck is a hard nut to crack but I think you are on the absolute right track. I will try to share what works for me. As you surely know the deck plays vastly differently with and without a fliped Sasaya, so I will give you my thoughts for each part, as well as a few general things I found useful.

Pre-flip: This is the part where every mana spent counts. Spells you want to cast here should be as cheap as possible and make flipping easier. It seems kinda obvious but: to have 7 lands in hand, you have to have at least 7 cards in hand! Keeping your card count high while playing spells and lands is key for a fast flip. Continuous card draw like Howling Mine works great for this, top deck manipulation with Sensei's Divining Top is also nice. Spells like Gatecreeper Vine are essentially a land in your hand while providing a blocker too. Ramunap Excavator and Crucible of Worlds let you play fetch lands or cycle lands from your graveyard keeping your stock in hand high. For that same reason Cultivate , Kodama's Reach , Peregrination and Khalni Gem are the best ramp spells you can get. Renegade Map , Traveler's Amulet and Wanderer's Twig push you over the threshold right before the turn you need it. Yes, they erode your hand size at first but that's right when Gaea's Bounty and the likes come in.

Post-flip: Great, you got 7 lands in hand and can flip! But what else? City of Solitude would be another Dosan to protect you, but the real problem is finding a payoff card in a deck that is almost 70% setup. As you already play the Portal and the Ring, I guess you'll like Skyship Weatherlight too. You'll run out of life before you run out of mana with Book of Rass . Personally I prefer cards I can play pre-flip and can activate post-flip. Domesticated Hydra or Unyaro Bees look stupid when you play them, but finish off the most dangerous opponent quickly. Temur Sabertooth can be used in too many ways to count. Polukranos, World Eater is a boardwipe (together with Khamal, a landwipe too) and finishes off whoever can't play a blocker fast enough. Realm Seekers are huge or can get a new set of lands, in case someone removes Sasaya.

My personal favorite: Oath of Druids ! You wouldn't think it works, but it simply does. It is a fast way to find Life, hitting a payoff creature means you don't have to cast it and the overall confusion when something big jumps out of another deck is a great distraction. Everytime I play it, the game is a blast!

General thoughts: A few things, that come to mind, because they work for me. Please see this as constructive critique you can ignore too, if you think your deck works for you. Because every extra land drop lowers your card count I really don't like additional land drops. While they are great for ramping pre-flip, they postpone the flip and become almost negligible post-flip. Essentially they are rituals and I only consider Summer Bloom worth the slot. I see you don't play any utility lands, but I think Glacial Chasm is just too good to pass up. While we're on the topic of utility lands, I really think you should reconsider on playing cards that give no maximum hand size too. To reiterate: you can only reveal 7 lands if you have at least 7 cards in hand. Having the leeway of more cards beside your lands is what makes the effect a must have in my opinion. Library of Leng and Thought Vessel are worth their slots for me, next to the Tower. You not playing this effect creates a spiral: you still have to get up to 7 lands but you can never not consider what to do at your cleanup, suddenly searching for multiple lands becomes worse, then you have less food for spell mastery or delirium. Everything together is costing you at least 1 turn pre-flip. Especially if you chose not to play "no maximum hand size"-cards, but also in general, playing lands from your graveyard is always a good way to preserve your hand size. You state the the wave chain as your best win condition and you are absolutely right, it is the best. Still I don't like the Memorial just for how useless it is pre-flip. Let's be honest if the first Wave hits an E-Wit, you can Wave for the whole deck. What you win the game with in the end doesn't really matter. I like Goblin Canon because it can still work pre-flip in a pinch and still works in the wave.

Too many cards to suggest but I hope there are some cards you want to try out. If you have questions I'll gladly follow up. Cheers!

I was intrigued and looked for your list, but I didn't see it on TappedOut. We should compare, at the very least!

In any case, sorry it took so long to write this response. I wanted to try and break down what I think are your main points, and, well, I apologize if I misinterpreted you, but here's what I got out of your comment:

The way I read it, it looks like you're saying the deck needs to be slower. This reading is a little unfair on my part, possibly a little too overly hostile, but, I mean, I can't fathom a turn-six kill when I play a card like Peregrination on turn four. Like, that's just not going to happen. And if you're arguing that the deck becomes more able to grind, well, I have two problems with that:

First, I guess I don't know your meta entirely, but do non-optomized tables not just gun for Sasaya immediately? Like, even just reading what she does kind of sets off some alarm bells, doesn't it? I know everytime I play with somebody new, whenever I get to the "So if I have six Forests out, they all tap for six green" bit, the inevitable response is something akin to "Oh, that's not good." And then if the combo does work, all the more incentive to get targeted next game, or next week, or whenever I play the deck again. That's why I aim for speed above everything else, because if I don't, well, I just get run over.

Second, the methods you suggest of becoming more resilient don't really work? Like, yeah, Howling Mine has its uses, but I'd really rather not give my opponents more cards to beat me with, because I'm still the target. It's also why I'm skeptical of Oath of Druids . It's not that I probably won't get free stuff, it's that other people get free stuff first, and when Sasaya's on top of the hill -- a position the deck's going to be in until it's dead -- all that free stuff is headed right at me. I figure you disagree with me about this -- I mean, you did talk about how people want to deal with other people's threats -- but that really hasn't been my experience.

Incidentally, these are the reasons I cut utility lands as well. They do have a use. Of course they have a use. But that use is kind of marginal when just playing them makes the deck slower. If they were named "Forest" or "Snow-Covered Forest", we might be talking, but they're not. The only instance I can imagine where that wouldn't be the case is hitting one off of Oracle of Mul Daya , and that seems kind of marginal at best. I've mentioned this before, but sometimes I'm not even sure Scrying Sheets belongs in this deck.

But, speaking of Utility lands, let's talk Reliquary Tower . Or, I guess more specifically, "no max hand size" effects and why I think they're bad/overrated:

So the consensus as far as I understand it in "real EDH" (read: non-Sasaya) circles is that these cards (Reliquary Tower specifically, though I imagine Spellbook and Library of Leng have similar reasoning (at least Thought Vessel is a mana rock)) are kind of win-more. Like, there is definitely the feel-bad psychological effect of casting a big Blue Sun's Zenith , not finding an outlet for all those cards, and having to discard all the way back down to seven, effectively wasting all that mana, but if you think about it, at the end of the day you're still keeping seven really good cards. So that plus the fact that the graveyard is much more of a resource in EDH than almost anywhere else, and the "no max hand size" effect starts to lose its luster.

But let's talk about Sasaya specifically. As you mentioned, seven lands is a lot of hand space. Under normal circumstances, that means you'll only really have room for one payoff spell, so it better be a good one (put a pin in this idea, we'll come back to it in a bit). But there are alternatives. Last paragraph, I talked about the feel-bad of not getting to keep that big hand, but remember how that big hand happened in the first place: a Blue Sun's Zenith. More specific to my point: an instant.

Continuing this thought experiment a little further, let's ask why a player might cast a 7+ card draw spell in the first place. One might imagine that a player casts such a draw spell hoping for an effect that removes their hand limit, but that's not the only possibility. They could also be looking for a specific combo -- a way to end the game. Compare that to Sasaya's instant-speed land searchers (a special shout-out to Yavimaya Elder !). In Sasaya's case, the payoff effect we're looking for is already in the Command Zone.

In my opinion, therefore, the deck doesn't need its hand limit removed because there are enough effects that ignore that limitation, and cards like Expedition Map that can find these cards aren't actually that good.

But the "why" for that specific claim is a different topic entirely. Let's talk about it!

In your post, you mentioned that cards like Cultivate , Kodama's Reach , and Peregrination were all "ideal ramp spells" for a Sasaya player, as they also added a land to the hand, therefore ending up card-positive. Now, I already dismissed Peregrination out of hand for being too slow, but it's important to include it here as well because I feel it has the same other trappings that might encourage a Sasaya player to play these cards. In short, I posit that these cards are, in fact, card-neutral at best.

This applies to Renegade Map et al. as well, but I'm just going to focus on the sorceries just for simplicity's sake. Let's examine a typical goldfish turn. First, the draw step. Obviously, they're at plus one card. Then, the goldfish plays a land, removing a card, then playing a non-land, which is minus another. If that non-land is a Cultivate effect, that only adds one card back, which leaves the goldfish more or less where they started. Because ramp becomes negligible once Sasaya flips (while there is certainly a difference between, say, eightteen starting mana and twenty-eight, I find it's not enough to worry about, and the difference between twenty-eight and forty is even less), that means the goldfish is spending three mana on nothing much at all (as a sidenote, you might notice Nissa's Pilgrimage and Evolution Charm in the deck, which seem to contradict this point. However, both of these cards have occasional upside potential. It doesn't always happen (and, in Pilgrimage's case, certainly never on Turn 3), but circumstances for it do exist, so they keep their slots).

The solution some Sasaya players offer is to stop making land drops, but that seems so tempo-negative to me. I feel that, if I do continue making land-drops, eventually I'll be able to cast these giant threats without the help of Sasaya, and could easily win the game that way.

Lastly, before I get into specific cards, I wanted to talk about the ramp spells I do play. Namely Azusa, Lost but Seeking and similar effects. I already mentioned the speed aspect of my build, and these cards are a part of that. To be more specific, these cards are in the deck to turn cards like Chord of Calling and Citanul Flute into more ramp if necessary, which, when you're going for a Sasaya flip and a kill in the same turn, is worth having in the toolbox. But these cards also function as pseudo-alternate win-conditions. As I alluded to just a paragraph above, the only difference between tapping ten lands for a Kozilek, Butcher of Truth and tapping one or two is how smug the caster gets to feel. But the caster still gets an eldrazi in either method, so I don't think the difference in smugness is very big.

So now we come back to that pin I made earlier. Let's talk card specifics. Now, I've tried to go through a lot of these already, sifting through to get at your main points, but there are some notable stragglers, so let's take a look:

City of Solitude : The biggest strike against this card is that it's not easily tutorable and Dosan the Falling Leaf is. Also, I don't think I need two of this effect, to be honest.

Summer Bloom : I've tried it. The problem is, because it's a one-shot effect, it's way too dead pre-flip. Azusa and her kin are both tutorable and stick around, so they're just better.

Skyship Weatherlight : This and Book of Rass are my two favorite suggestions, and I definitely want to try playing around with them on paper instead of just theorycrafting. If there's anything you take from this too-long screed, I want to thank you for bringing these cards to my attention.

Goblin Cannon : This was suggested before and I didn't really dismiss it off-hand, though I did ask "What do I cut?" I didn't have a good answer, then, though maybe it's -1 Akroma's Memorial , Hydra Broodmaster , and Kamahl, Fist of Krosa for +1 Goblin Cannon , Book of Rass , and Skyship Weatherlight ? I'm still hesitant because Kamahl at least is fine pre-flip (Broodmaster is bad yes, but not terrible. At least, I think there's a difference there), not to mention in my meta, effects like Crawlspace and Ensnaring Bridge are less popular than Leyline of Sanctity or even Aegis of the Gods . I guess there I'll have to test and see. You're right, by the way, about Akroma's Memorial being pretty dead 99% of the time, but it's the best haste outlet, and specific kill's been good enough for me.

If I didn't mention a card here, it's because it obviously is different from either my strategy as I've listed in various places, or is implicitly against the deckbuilding philosophy of my particular list. Or maybe I missed it, and you can bring it up if/when you respond.

In any case, thanks for the comment, and keep fighting the mono-green combo fight!

-r

Hello again!

Thank you for your very detailed response! Let me start by saying: Please, there is no need to apologize at all! English is not my first language and the problems that come with this deck are quite complex. You are not missunderstanding, if anything it is me, not being able to communicate exactly what I want to convey. Let me continue by disappointing you: my deck is not on TO right now! Maybe I'll get around to type it in some time next week, but I can tell you our lists are very similar. I'll try to tackle your comment a bit differently this time as I think I see your train of choices and can understand why it is working for you.

Meta Decisions: My meta covers everything, from cedh breakfast hulk to precon decks. There are always over 15 changing players, at least 3 new decks, at least 1 completely new player, every week. I want my deck to keep up and be lenient enough at the same time to play with everyone. If I play Sasaya, it's either just another green ramp deck, a weak one compared to some, or just another combo deck, a slow one compared to some, or I have to remember everyone what the heck it even does. I spcifically prey on this situation and can throw people off by not doing anything for 5 turns or throwing an Oath at them turn 2. You are absolutely right, if your opponents figure you out, you don't have much chance with Sasaya. That's exactly why I try to confuse the table with cards like Oath, soothe them with a Howling Mine, kill them in ways they can't be mad at, like Domesticated Hydra. It is a very specific play style that, I would say, only works in a highly diverse meta with changing players.

Conquering your Meta: If your meta is starting to focus you can try playing more chumpers that search for a land, like Gatecreeper Vine and Sylvan Ranger . Just a single blocker is often enough to deter opponents from attacking. I swapped them one for one with a forest a few times and it didn't slow me down at all. Moment's Peace was working out for me too. Again I want to recommend Glacial Chasm , it just keeps you alive like no other card, buys you more turns than you lose by sacrificing and playing a non-forest. But realisticly, if the table really wants you dead, there isn't that much you can do. In my opinion, with a deck that's 75% setup, you just have to rely on smoke and mirrors for a fair part to get by.

Connecting Card Draw and Ramp: I have a general philosophy when it comes to card draw: don't ever pay more than 2 mana per card drawn! My deck wants to have at least 7 cards in hand all the time. By recommending Howling Mine I just wanted to state continous card draw as the best draw option pre-flip for that setup. In conjunction with "no maximum hand size" effects you can still fly under the radar with about 9 cards in hand. My ramp approach with Cultivate and Kodama's Reach, instead of multiple land drops. just feeds into that further. Why waste those hard earned lands for a land drop?

Comparing our Approaches: I know your approach is just different and can get there too. Going for multiple land drops keeps your hand size lower, "no max hand size" is not needed. Although, I guess, you rely more on that one burst step with cards like the Elder (he really is the best!), before you go off. I play those too, but only the one time uses. In my opinion, cards like Journeyer's Kite give you a card you need, but not want, for too high of a price, but does so at the right time. By playing general card draw instead of those continous land tutors, I have the chance to draw into a win condition mid game. My approach keeps options open pre-flip, has room for a few removal cards or has multiple win options post-flip. I can go lower on lands too! The tipping point for me are the mulligans though. As you know, going down even a single card delays the flip turn like nothing else. The two main reasons for a mull are too many lands or no win condition. I become less reliant on a win condition in my starting 7 while your approach deals better with too many lands. You also choose cards that can work after a fast ramp too, to offset the few times you can't get to the flip, that's not an option for me. I can't say which way is the better one, I honestly don't think one is. But if your flip turn is consistent for you, all should be fine. Overall I'd say I gain a few slots at for utility, removal or fun (=Oath), but not that many. The setup for Sasaya just has to have a certain size to work.

A Similar Mindset: Interestingly, our general evaluation of hand card economy and spell costs are quite alike. We just took a bit different paths to reach the same destination. In no way I think you should change your deck just because it isn't mine! Do what works for you! If you like it, stay with it! I just tried to give you an overview of what works for me.

Hope that clears up a few things. I'll try to find my old "full blown combo" list and upload it for comparison. If you want me to go more into detailed card decisions for your meta, I'm sure I can help, as I played Sasaya in different setups through different metas. I would just need a better understanding what you are dealing with on a regular basis (commanders, archetyps, avg. win turn, etc.). Cheers!

Awesome deck! On my first playtest (assuming goldfishing opponents, of course) I did about 17000 damage on turn four.

Nice list! I've been playing Sasaya for a long time and just wrote a full primer for my own version of the deck. Looks like we had a lot of similar ideas, and I think I have got the list pretty nearly optimized. Here's the page if you want to check it out!

https://tappedout.net/mtg-decks/dont-sass-me-boy-edh-sasaya-landsdec/

I really like your include of Shared Summons btw, I did not have that one in my list and may have to try and find a slot for it, as it's very versatile and good.