Trade Routes

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Legality

Format Legality
1v1 Commander Legal
Archenemy Legal
Block Constructed Legal
Canadian Highlander Legal
Casual Legal
Commander / EDH Legal
Commander: Rule 0 Legal
Custom Legal
Duel Commander Legal
Highlander Legal
Legacy Legal
Leviathan Legal
Limited Legal
Modern Legal
Oathbreaker Legal
Planechase Legal
Premodern Legal
Quest Magic Legal
Tiny Leaders Legal
Vanguard Legal
Vintage Legal

Trade Routes

Enchantment

(1): Return target land you control to its owner's hand.

(1), Discard a land card: Draw a card.

Khurgar on Modern Lands

1 year ago

Allright, so here's the "how the fk does it work?" part.

The deck is a prett slow one that takes some time before it really activates, so several cards both in the main deck and side board are there to mitigate the pressure that we might suffer from early plays. Lightning Bolt, Fire / Ice and Arboreal Grazer fills these slots in the main deck.

What the deck wants to do is generally to discard lands with Seismic Assault to deal damage to the enemy, then use cards such as Wrenn and Six, Life from the Loam and Slogurk, the Overslime to recur those lands to your hand again.

Trade Routes is used for 3 reasons. The first is pretty straight forwards, use your land cards in hand to generate new cards. Second use is to be able to play your channel lands early in the game to give mana while being able to pick them up later in the game to use their channel effect. And the third one is to make Slogurk, the Overslime to grow rapidly. If you discard a land and opt to dredge a Life from the Loam, Slogurk, the Overslime can grow anywhere between +1 to +4 +1/+1 counters for a single mana, ontop of digging for utility lands that you can return later.

Sadly I have not had a lot of time playtesting it, and I think that the sideboard needs a lot of work. First and foremost I feel like I have doubled down a bit too hard on artifact hate, albeit with a lot of cards with multi purpose.

Anyways, the rundown of why I included the cards are as follows: Damping Sphere was included to stop decks such as tron and titan, and it also works well versus decks such as breach or storm or other more jank combos such as neobrand.

Pithing Needle and Relic of Progenitus dont need explaining.

Brotherhood's End was included to deal with asmo decks, affinity, prison tron, goblins, merfolk and other similar decks to these.

Force of Vigor is in the deck solely because I have no way to stop a turn 2 kill from hammer, other than blocking with an Arboreal Grazer. I am strongly considering cutting it though.

Haywire Mite is included to stop Kaldra Compleat, but will probably see play in the same games that my other artifact and enchantment hate cards.

Otawara, Soaring City is just so that you are more likely to draw them, especially in matchups where they run pithing needle to stop Boseiju, Who Endures, but is also really good for returning combo pieces to hand, or just big beaters like murktide. Its also really good vs tokens.

Boseiju, Who Endures just a really solid card, deals with most problems the deck faces, such as graveyard hate and blood moon effects.

Bojuka Bog is a fantastic card in this deck. With this card and Trade Routes you can exile your opponents graveyard every turn if you'd like, although it is only in sorcery speed.

Cards that I would like to experiment with: Expressive Iteration is a card that I am gonna experiment with in place of Fire / Ice. I think that Fire / Ice is much better at stalling out the game, but expressive is such a valuable card to have in the mid game.

Academy Ruins and Buried Ruin to be able to get artifacts back from the graveyard.

Shadowspear to deal with agressive matchups where the opponent have no good way of dealing with my constructs or Slogurk, the Overslime.

Orvar, the All-Form versus decks that enjoy discarding your hand, so generally versus decks that runs archong or liliana.

I hope you enjoyed the read, give me some thoughts in the comments if you have any =)

SufferFromEDHD on Keranos Lands

1 year ago

Such a clever concept. Big fan of "less is more" and this list is it. I too have an Izzet 43 Lands.dec list piloted by Keranos but my theme/gimmick was Legacy 43 lands.dec your glass cannon heavy land based combo is awesome!

I'm going to spit ball some ideas because your list got my creative juices flowing:

Cursed Scroll that many basics makes this efficient colorless damage.

Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle make something out of all those basic mountains.

Fiery Islet/Prismari Campus high quality filter and card draw.

Tolaria West tutor for the utility lands.

Burning Sands/Mana BreachOverburden I always try and sneak a stax tax or 2 in my combo decks. These similar cards are an irrelevant tax to you but brutal to aggro strategies.

Back to Basics brutal to greedy mana bases.

Retreat to Coralhelm/Valakut Exploration good value for playing lands.

Fathom Trawl cascade tutor. Treasure Hunt #2

Cut Tectonic Reformation. Add Trade Routes. The synergy with Seismic Assault is necessary to your strategy.

Arzais on Omnath, A Song of Creation and Chaos

1 year ago

Zero regrets on slotting in Sunscorched Desert absolutely beast. Retreat to Coralhelm and Sakura-Tribe Scout really like this card with a Trade Routes or Storm Cauldron also in play!

Arzais on Omnath, A Song of Creation and Chaos

1 year ago

That play must've had some style! I am intrigued by you mentioning Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle. My build is very similar to the main one listed here, however, it focuses more-so on boucing lands and includes a higher amount of Trade Routes type effects. I have been playing with the idea of including Sunscorched Desert as a back up wincon... What do you guys think of that card? I for one have read it can combo off with Kodama/Sakashima (Tooth and Nail) or a land bounce effect!

enpc on cEDH is going to have …

1 year ago

jaymc1130: I think the easiest way to address your comment is directly.

"There are about a dozen players in the entire world who can play that game at a truly competitive level out of the 100s of thousands that play."

I would say that this comment pretty adequtely sums up the point you're trying to make in paragraph one. The biggest flaw I see here is that you're basically claiming that there's so few "actual" cEDH players that it boils down to you and your playgroup. And sure, if that's the premise of your position, then I can't challenge that argument as I'm sure the card has made a big splash in your playgroup. But the problem you now have is sample size. If your definition of the meta is only the players you deem as "competitive" then you your data is going to be massively skewed, regardless of how good your combo is.

Your second point around Strip Mine being the dominant meta deck falls into the exact issue as I raised in the previous paragraph. And while I'll admit that I'm not 100% up to date with every little thing with regards to cEDH, I have seen little to no Strip Mine/Azusa, Lost but Seeking across the greater decklists I have seen. And I am by no means calling myself the be-all and end-all of cEDH (by a large margin) however if it was such a dominant stragety you'd think it would be much more heavily played.

"Thirdly, you've failed to understand how resilient the Bloom concept combos have now become if you think the critical weak points are Crucible of Worlds and Ramunap Excavator."

I understand that the combo can have plenty of resilience if you add more cards, however your original post never talked about Trade Routes. Using it as an argument now does indeed increase the redundancy in your deck, but at the cost of card slots. Similaryly I could put together a commander deck that had 10-15 points of redundancy, but at the cost of the vast majority of card slots. Additonally, the point I made around lynch pins with Squandered Resources was in direct refernce to your deck T&T Bloom Scepter [cEDH Primer] which runs neither Crucible of Worlds or Trade Routes and which was updated 1 day ago so I would assume is up to date.

"All people look at is what channels like PwP or LM do on youtube and think that stuff is competitive in nature. It is not. Those are exclusively amateur players playing in a mostly amateur fashion. In fact, from a level of gameplay perspective, most of their videos are unwatchable because the level of play is just plain terrible."

First off, I will preface this by saying that I occasionally watch these videos and by not means am drawing on them as my sole inspiration for deckbuilding. I will state however that for the vast majority of players, this is what they consider cEDH, along with Labmaniacs and a few others. And while you can poo-poo this all you like, we then come back to the "sample size" argument.

My issue though with your spruiking of the combo comes down to adoption rate. While you did make the comment that "the cEDH community is glacially slow to adapt and learn new things", cards like Thassa's Oracle were immediately adopted by the community as a whole which somewhat disproves this. Even cards like Codie, Vociferous Codex are being heavily played now as very strong commanders. And again, while I have said before and will happily say again that I do think your combo is a good combo package, I would challenge your insinuation that the only reason the entirity of the cEDH community isn't playing it is becuase they're all just slow (insert ItsTheChildrenThatAreWrong.gif).

As a side note, and this is entirely personal advice - take it how you want, I think that part of the reason you're having certain issues with people taking your deck seriously comes down to perceived attitude. I have seen you on tapped out for well over a year spruiking this strategy of yours, however the problem I see is that A) you cosntatly talk about the combo package with little to no explanation about how it works (or even a reference to a deck which explains it) and B) have a habit of talking down to people who disagree with your opinion.

On the point of A - I understand that there are a lot of moving parts in the combo and I understand that it's an advanced combo to pilot, but you're not winning any friends by attempting to set the bar to entry as "if you don't understand it from the pile of cards then you're not good enough to play it and not worth my time". I'm not saying that this is your intention, however I have read multiple posts on multiple threads from you about this and this is the vibe that I pick up repeatedly. And I'm not saying that you have to be on the other end of the spectrum either, but you will definitely help change others' opinions about the strategy if you first help them to understand it and the many layers it has.

On the point of B (which I have kind of covered above) - coming at every discussion about the strategy with an air of arrogance is generally going to drive people away, not make them eager to learn more. As for your professional MtG prowess, I understand the importance of anonymity on the internet, however the double edged sword is that people talk a lot of crap on the internet that may or may not be true. And while I don't want you to think that I'm straight up calling you a liar, I'm sure you can understand that many people take others' comments with a grain of salt, lest be continously deceived. It might also be the Australian in me but generally here people who talk themselves up repeatedly get called a lot of four letter words.

Edit for clarity - In general I don't think that there's an issue with your interactions on other places on the site and I have even seen you leave a lot of helpful advice for others. I am referring specifically to conversations around this particular topic of discussion.

As for the MLB thing, I did not know that at all, but that's pretty cool. I'm personally not a baseball fan (it's not big here) but I have met quite a few athletes in my day who performed at the kind of level you're talking about in other sports, so I know that's a big achievement.

jaymc1130 on cEDH is going to have …

1 year ago

enpc

There's a whole lot wrong with this statement. Most of it simply is not accurate, or fails as it is working from assumptions based on casual/amateur players playing with cEDH decks.

It's like looking at the recent Marchesa tournament and concluding Magda is an overly powerful archetype because of it's win in that tournament. As far as I know, this was not a professional level MtG event, I do not know of a single professional caliber player that attended. It was an amateur event almost exclusively participated in by amateur level players, and the level of competitiveness is very unlikely to be something one could consider "competitive" in a true sense. Now, you know I have a high standard for competitive play coming from a professional level of play myself over my MtG career, so sure, there is some debate that could be had about where that bar should be set, but, quite frankly, as with any sport or game or competition true competitiveness doesn't really begin until you're talking about the top <1% of players in the world. As a multi time world rank 1 player myself of games like Terraforming Mars I can attest to the simple fact that 99% of my games were, and still are not, competitive in nature. There are about a dozen players in the entire world who can play that game at a truly competitive level out of the 100s of thousands that play. Same goes for, say, the MLB (another thing I tried my hand at competitively that you are aware of as it was a professional baseball career that was my primary focus in highschool which lead to my lackluster performances at professional level MtG events during that time span). College level baseball is simply not competitive in a true sense, it's competitive relative the level of skill of the players participating. The same goes for A ball, and AA ball, and even AAA ball. If I'd been capable of true competitive level play you'd be talking to a multi millionaire celebrity as opposed to a card game enthusiast. So that's first and foremost thing that ought to be addressed.

Secondly, the fact you state graveyard recursion of Strip Mine being around for a while and not being a problem exemplifies the aforementioned inability to discern true competitive level concepts from powerful concepts. Strip Mine recursion lists are the absolute most dominant lists in the meta currently, and have been for well over a year. You can ask SynergyBuild if you want another opinion on how effective that particular concept has been. The true competitive meta for most of the last year has been warped by Bloom and Farm decks, with the Bloom Farm decks that combine the archetypes putting up some pretty insane win rates. Strip Mine isn't going to become a problem because of these new cards, Strip Mine has ALREADY BEEN a huge problem in true competitive settings for over a year, and, as usual, the average casual/amateur player hasn't noticed at all. There's a reason a handful of folks like SynergyBuild and myself are constantly 2 years ahead of the meta changes that occur, and you've got all the evidence you need of this fact here, on this site, with a bevy of posts from just the two of us over the years highlighting meta shifts months and years ahead of them actually happening. And we are by no means the only ones on this site, there are a small handful of others as well.

Thirdly, you've failed to understand how resilient the Bloom concept combos have now become if you think the critical weak points are Crucible of Worlds and Ramunap Excavator. Bouncing lands to hand with Trade Routes or Cloudstone Curio forgoes a need for the combo to have access to the yard at all for some very specific loops, and certainly access to playing lands from the yard in the vast majority of them. These are not unique critical points of failure any more, where 2 and 3 years ago they would have been. That portion of the combo has become so robust it is not viable to attack it from that angle, the best bet is to simply exile and remove the Summer Bloom itself as it is the only unique portion of the combo that is now required.

Now, will these things mean the combo starts to become immediately pervasive throughout the meta? No, as stated, the cEDH community is glacially slow to adapt and learn new things. All people look at is what channels like PwP or LM do on youtube and think that stuff is competitive in nature. It is not. Those are exclusively amateur players playing in a mostly amateur fashion. In fact, from a level of gameplay perspective, most of their videos are unwatchable because the level of play is just plain terrible. It's fine to use those places as resources for the most basic of fundamentals, but that's not how the cEDH community uses those resources. The larger community thinks that IS high level play, and the reality of the situation is that it's slightly above average amateur level of play. So no, as stated in the OP of this thread, I don't expect things to change radically, because, historically, change has usually been extremely slow. You can add to this the fact that Dauthi Voidwalker is a very powerful deterrent to the Bloom archetypes because it blanks most of the value portion of the play patterns and should be an auto include in any deck with Black, but it remains to be seen just how impactful this card can be. The Bloom archetypes have been dealing with graveyard hate this entire time and still managing best in format win rate potentials, so I'm personally interested to see if these factors offset, or favor the Voidwalker or Bloom side of the matchup. The biggest problem is that the exact decks best positioned to make use of the Voidwalker are also the same decks currently employing the Bloom combo, the Sultai midrange attrition based shells.

Of the cards that work as a part of this package, I think you've hit the nail on the head with Boseiju being the one perhaps most likely to be banned. There are really only two choices to hit if this package does prove problematic, and it's the Bloom at the center of it all, or Boseiju that cranks up the power a couple of notches. Personally, I don't have enough data about performance yet to lean one way or another in terms of which I'd find more likely to get the hammer, but it almost assuredly would have to be one of these two.

erikthor13 on Slogurk, Lands Don't Matter

2 years ago

i think you could get some use out of some of the better Moonfolk that return a land to your hand, combined with things that you have like Ayula's Influence. Meloku the Clouded Mirror and Uyo, Silent Prophet are probably the best but a couple other cool ones are Soratami Mirror-Mage and Soratami Savant. some other useful tricks to return lands to your hands are Vapor Snare, Deprive and Tragic Lesson. Trench Behemoth could also be an alternate win condition along the same vein. a few other land discard cards are Trade Routes and Compulsive Research. Greenseeker would also be very useful here. sweet deck overall and probably not room to add all of this but a few more tweaks could really make this shine.

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