Hello folks, and welcome to this mess that somehow can be called a deck.
I drawed ideas from all short of similar decks i saw in the pastand tried to condense the best part of the strategy of each of them.
The way this decks functions is no mistery, we mess with enemy lands and lock them untill we beat them.
We achieve this by turning enemy lands into islands with Sea's Claim, Spreading Seas and Convincing Mirage. Messing with the enemy color manabase isnt enough since it doesnt really lower the amount of mana they produce, thats when the other cards enter in action here.
The most notable one is surely Choke. Once we have converted some lands Choke enters and lock them into untappeable lands wheter they were or werent islands on the first place. Stone Rain pretty much explains itself what is doing here: a realiable land messing spell.Crumble to Dust does some nice work here too, allowing us to get rid of a land of the battlefield and also reducing the probability of the enemy drawing a land.
But here comes the real deal: Root Maze. What the heck is this card are you probably wondering. Well, to me is the keystone that led me bluild this deck. The whole Choke strategy force us to have and entire mana base that has to be blue but contain no islands despite having so many blue mana simbols in our cards. This narrow incredibly the type of lands we can put in this deck and makes it inconsistent. But what if it wouldnt matter because we can turn everything into a tap land? Root Maze makes Woodland Stream and Breeding Pool basically the same under its effect since it doenst matter if you pay the life on the shockland it still enter tapped. Once we manage to get one of these on the battlefield we are not really punished by running Frontier Bivouac or the two manlands Wandering Fumarole and Lumbering Falls. It even give us an enourmous advantage against fetchlands, wich takes actually two turns to bring a land ready for tapping some mana.
Honestly this deck is far away of even being playable. Mana Leak takes advantage of the reduced mana of the enemy, Blink of an Eye can return a permanent to the enemy hand that can no longer cast by color or amount of mana, and Chemister's Insight can cycle extra copies of Choke and Root Maze that could be potential dead cards in our hands; but still it doesnt feel like its enough to make it through.
One issue i still find is the pressure we have to make to take advantage of this lock on enemy lands; at first i thought that the manlands could be enough, but the idea of adding a planeswaker that give us value is starting to grow on me.
Anyway feel free to give any feedback, opinions or suggestions you have and i hope you enjoyed this deck :).
