Tatyova has been one tough nut to crack.
Her ability is strong among simic generals, and is just non specific enough to really guide your hand as to how to build it. After much deliberation, I have come up with what I feel to be the ideal build direction, though it is not fully refined yet.
Aetherflux resevoir
This card is our build around. Aetherflux wants a lot of mana and a lot of gas so we can chain together spells, gain life, and dome our opponents for 50.
Conveniently enough, Tatyova, Benthic Druid wants us to gain life and draw cards (more gas) by playing lands (adding mana). The two seem like a match made in simic heaven.
We fascilitate this lifegain strategy with cards like Alhammarret's Archive (that nets us extra life AND card draw), Courser of Kruphix, and Zuran Orb (which gives us a zero mana way to get those last few points of health to close the game AND let's us stabilize against aggro strategies). Probably my favorite tech card for this part of the strategy is Radiant Fountain which, with combos we will discuss later, can give us a way to gain infinite or ludicrously high life.
The deck relies heavily on the card draw tatyova provides to dig for aetherflux, but we do have tutors for it like Fabricate. We also need to make sure that we can keep it around, as it will often be our opponents first target when they realize what we are doing. To help us here, we have Eternal Witness and Noxious Revival that will all help us get the power tower back on the field.
But, there will be times that this strategy just doesn't cut it. Either our resevoir gets exiled, or our opponents are gaining more life than we can get to with Tatyova alone. For this, we need some good old fashion infinite shenanigans.
Infinite Shenanigans
This is where Sakura-Tribe Scout, Llanowar Scout, or Walking Atlas and Retreat to Coralhelm come in. This pairing allows three different cards in our deck to result in infinite landfall triggers of varying effects.
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Oboro, Palace in the Clouds plus the above combo results in infinite landfall triggers because Oboro can produce the mana to bounce itself to hand. This is great to draw out deck with Tatyova or Nissa's Ultimate or great to pump our plant tokens sky high at the end of an opponents turn.
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Meloku the Clouded Mirror and any untap land will result in infinite 1/1 flyers and can be done at instant speed.
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Words of Wind and any untap land will result in infinite triggers for our opponents to return a permanent to their hand. Note, we need Tatyova or Nissa, Vital Force ult on field to make this work.
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Trade Routes will just result in infinite landfall triggers, but we can use this to draw through our deck, eventually finding Avenger of Zendikar which can be cast at instant speed if we have one of three cards on field and then use those infinite landfall triggers to make our plant tokens massive enough to kill all of our opponents. This is also where the prior mentioned Radiant Fountain becomes really good. We can gain 3 life per cycle with our commander out before we draw to Aetherflux and kill our opponent. Talk about synergy.
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Tireless Tracker plus Simic Growth Chamber and Amulet of Vigor with the above combo lets us to a sort of impression of Tatyova and draw our whole deck. We tap a scout to put chamber in play, which untaps from amulet, which can then float two mana before bouncing to our hand. This triggers landfall on retreat, which we use to untap the scout. This also triggers tracker, giving us a clue that we can pay the two floating mana into to draw a card.
Also worthy of note is that any of these combos with Lotus Cobra on field also result in nigh infinite mana production. But we will discuss him a bit more in a moment.
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Patron of the Moon is an insane magic card. In this strategy, he is just simply good by himself because, with Tatyova out, it is one mana, draw two cards. But, where it really shines is when we have the prior mentioned Lotus Cobra out along with Amulet of Vigor and any one mana way of returning lands to hand. This means that the lands enter untapped, generating one mana for each land, and can immediately be bounced back to hand for infinite landfall triggers of any kind. This will also result in infinite mana as well.
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Oboro, Palace in the Clouds plus Patron of the Moon along with Amulet of Vigor and Lotus Cobra will result in infinite landfall because lotus cobra will produce one mana when Oboro enters untapped (due to amulet of vigor) and then Oboro can produce the one mana it needs to bounce itself to hand. We then use the one lotus cobra mana to keep the cycle going infinitely. This works really well with Tatyova to draw our deck or with Avenger of zendikar to infinitely pump our plant tokens.
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Simic Growth Chamber plus Patron of the Moon and Amulet of Vigor will result in infinite landfall triggers and infinite mana, as the growth chamber will enter untapped and be able to be tapped for 2 mana before bouncing itself to our hand. Use on mana to activate Patron again and keep the fun going. We can use this along with our commander to dig for a win con or for a bunch of other things.
Other Value
The rest of the deck is comprised of ways to ramp lands, ways to play more lands per turn, interaction, and ways to tutor out our pieces. There are a few spicy choices here that I want to note.
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Thwart is an objectively bad magic card. However, it can be amazing for us. The ability to return three Islands to hand for a Force of Will effect is simply amazing, as we always want to be replaying our lands.
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Muddle the Mixture is a decent counterspell, but it has the ability to be traded for several very important effects in our deck. It can find us ramp, interaction, no max handsize, and some combo pieces.
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Genesis Wave probably seems out of place here. It sort of is, but hear me out. Animist's Awakening seems to be one of the first cards that is thought of with Tatyova. However, I think this card is just better. The best thing that can happen with Animist's is that we hit a ton of lands on top and draw a ton of cards and those lands enter untapped. However, with Gen Wave we get all of the lands anyway as well as the ability to hit one of our combos and just end the game on the spot.
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Drift of Phantasms is a weird magic card. There will almost never be a time where you cast him as a 0/5 defender. What he is really for is tutoring for combo pieces. Simic is terrible at tutoring for enchantments, but drift can find Retreat to Coralhelm (which we really need to do sometimes because we have no redundancy at that effect), Sasaya, Orochi Ascendant (that gives us ludicrous mana), Blue Sun's Zenith or Genesis Wave (which can be powerful closers) and Fabricate (which can find us find aetherflux). That's a lot of targets for one spirity boi.
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Pir's Whim is just a really cool card and I want to point out how cool it is. If we want to be friendly, we can let everyone else ramp. In the likelihood that we aren't, the card reads "Go find a land, each opponent sacs an artifact or enchantment of their choosing". We'll take that value. The awesome side of this unrestricted land tutor is that it can find us Oboro, Palace in the Clouds (which can be one of our final combo pieces we need), Simic Growth Chamber (which will send a land back to our hand for another cantrip and cand be a combo piece), or Reliquary Tower (to give us no max hand size).
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Sculpting Steel is a card that has many roles it can fill in this deck. It's often not a bad play to just cast it as a copy of whatever juicy artifacts our opponents may play. Ideally, though, we want to use sculpting steel to copy Aetherflux Reservoir, Psychosis Crawler, Amulet of Vigor, or Walking Atlas. All of these plays are good, but with varying levels of strength. Copying amulet or reservoir gives us two instances of their respective triggers. Two amulets lets us do things like playing a simic growth chamber and floating four mana before it bounces back to our hand (because we get two untap triggers to respond to). You can see how this gets out of hand when we can play multiple lands in a turn. This is also really good with Thawing Glaciers.
Closing Thoughts
And there you have it! That is what I call an Aetherflux Landfall deck. If you have and questions/suggestions, I am always all ears. I will be testing this build over the coming weeks and will update along the way. Feel free to feed off of my ideas here and let me know what your experiences are.
Happy deckbuilding, friends!
