No land for any man, destroy it all!
My best friend recently gave me a whole 10 gallon tote full of his old cards that he hasn't used in many many years. This thing is full of binder after binder of old legacy cards. I've been in deck builder mode for days and came up with some old-school shenanigans built around the cards in those binders. There are several quite valuable gems, but I wanted to keep things simple and stick to what turned out to pretty much be Legacy Pauper. This deck is built around one of my favorite cards with one of the best red flavor texts from back in the day:
Goblin Gardener
. "Grow food in dirt? Save time. Eat dirt." I remember having a couple of red decks that used this guy, but none of them went all out land destruction. I guess it's just that time.
The concept here is simple: destroy your opponent's land through the first several turns to cripple their pace/strategy even at the cost of your own land with cards like Raze and
Tremble
. Then, build back up to four mana to play a
Dwarven Driller
and Goblin Gardener. There's no way you're opponent will allow you to just tap and destroy their land every turn so they will ultimately just keep taking the damage. The same should hold true for Goblin Gardener who becomes the ultimate chump blocker and assassin that will prevent attacks for fear of losing another land and will surely go unblocked for the same reason.
To keep the land hate dream alive and well, you can even raise the
Mogg Alarm
and destroy two of your own lands to play some tokens. 3 mana is easy enough to just play the card, but if both of you are feeling mutual land hate then it won't seem as unfair. It is unfair, though.
Raging Goblin
s are fast and cheap hasters that work well with
Onslaught
to ensure their damage pings through by tapping down creatures if your opponent actually found a way to play some. Rude. They also make great fodder for Shivan Harvest.
Price of Glory will make absolutely sure your opponent doesn't try anything funny during your turn. Counterspell? Whatever, burn for it.
Turf Wound
is the only instant in the deck and would be a really bad idea to play after Price of Glory. It could be worth it for even more tempo, but probably not. It would be funny though to drop after their draw step and you poker read that they drew a land and sacrifice three of your own to prevent that from happening. Evil, just evil.
Earth Rift
and
Implode
are fun to play later in the game and are helpful because of Flashback on Rift and the card draw from Implode.
Shivan Harvest and
Sowing Salt
great for those multi-color decks that use a lot of dual lands and special non-basic lands to fix their mana. Too bad for you.
Incendiary
is fun to play on Goblin Gardener as a finisher or just extra damage since you can build up counters and then attack or block to kill a land and deal some face damage. If your opponent wants to deal with this early, or even can, it'll cost them a land. You can also pop this whenever you want to with Shivan Harvest to get rid of two lands and deal face damage. If your early game went as planned and your opponent is many turns behind and completely land screwed then you should be able to take as much time as you need to make sure that Incendiary is lethal.
Landslide
is another fun way to finish the game by taking your last bit of land and throwing it at your opponent's face. No land for you, no land for me. That's how this relationship works.
Invader Parasite
is the only addition that I didn't find in one of the binders but fits the deck like a glove. This raises the land hate to 11 and really seals the deal in your favor. I would not want to be on the other side of the table for this one.
And that's it, flip the table in anger and say that it wasn't a real game. It really wasn't. You're not wrong. I had fun though.
