Sideboard

Enchantment (2)

Sorcery (1)

Land (2)


I just threw this together mostly because I wanted to play Dark Heart of the Wood. I'm pretty sure it works and is Old School legal. The deck wants to gain a bunch of life using Land Tax and Ivory Tower and ultimately win with the classic Channel + Fireball combo. This deck is just for fun, but suggestions are welcome!

Primary Plan

The main goal is to play Land Tax and Ivory Tower to fill your hand and gain some life. We don't play more than two or three lands until we're ready to win, so Land Tax is really just fuelling the (hopefully multiple) Ivory Towers. Library of Leng means we can keep all the lands in our hand until we need them and gain a ridiculous amount of life off the towers. We'll need about 25 life to go off, but usually we'll have significantly more.

What we need to win is Fastbond, Channel, and Fireball. All the lands we're pulling out of our deck with Land Tax thin the deck and make it easier to get what we need as well as making sure we have the lands to cast it. Sylvan Library is also very useful in digging deeper and Land Tax means we get to shuffle and see a fresh three cards each turn. In testing I've found it's pretty common to have enough life to comfortably keep all three cards drawn.

Once we have all the required cards in hand and enough life play Fastbond and drop all the lands needed to cast Channel and Fireball with Flash Counter backup if needed.

Main Deck Backup Plans

Fireball may not always be vialble so Lord of the Pit is in the main as another win condition. In this deck it basically has an upkeep of 7 life, but when we're gaining 20+ per turn, that's not really a problem.

When damage just won't do, there is the slow mill plan... This involves waiting for our opponent to mill themsleves out one draw at a time. Seems unlikely since we're thinning our deck so much, but Fastbond lets us play all of the lands in our hand and Dark Heart of the Wood lets us sacrifice them all so we can put them back in our deck with Feldon's Cane. With our high life total and refreshed library, we simply wait. Or do the cycle again if needed. Disenchant is in the main for Tormod's Crypt in case we're desperate enough to need this Plan C.

Notes

The deck plays way more lands than needed and only one dual so that Land Tax has plenty of targets. Only a few of the lands are needed to win, but the rest are needed to fuel life gain to keep us alive and feed the Channel.

The deck is 5 colour and mostly has Forests and Plains. We can get away with only a couple Swamps, Mountains, and Islands because we can hold them in hand until the turn we need them, which means even Strip Mine can't prevent us from going off through land destruction. We're also resilient to discard with our lands because of Library of Leng. And if we don't have the library for some reason we can put them back in the deck with Feldon's Cane and get them back in our next upkeep with another Land Tax trigger.

It's a bummer to draw multiples of Fastbond, Sylvan Library, or Library of Leng but they're so useful in the first instance that this isn't too big of a concern. Multiple Dark Heart of the Woods are useless as well, but since that's the card I specifically wanted to put in a deck there are and will always be two because I said so :). It can also be quite helpful if your opponent foolishly tries to have fewer lands than you, just sacrifice down to 0 lands ince you won't need them for a while.

Winter Orb slows the game right down and is basically one-sided given how few lands we want to play until the final turn.

The sideboard is mostly bringing in cards to protect what we're trying to do with things like Counterspell and Avoid Fate. Ichneumon Druid fits into this category but is more fun and unique than useful.

We also have two other win conditions in case regular damage doesn't work. Braingeyser accelerates the mill plan (Channel + Braingeyser can be enough to make them draw their entire deck), and Marsh Viper provides a slow poisonous win. Invisibility is there in case we need to win with one of our creatures and they have blockers. If they have walls we scoop.

Hurkyl's Recall is there to save our artifacts from destruction, enchantment, or theft.

There's a lot of in the sideboard, so we have a couple of Islands to help out.

Arboria was in the deck early on because we don't really cast spells or put cards into play so it means we're essentially immune to combat damage. However, the massive lifegain made this redundant. I have it in the sideboard for now, but would be happy to replace it with something more useful. I kind of want to get Black Vise in there, but I feel like it would be equally redundant...

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Casual

98% Competitive

Date added 1 month
Last updated 2 weeks
Legality

This deck is Oldschool 93/94 legal.

Rarity (main - side)

5 - 3 Rares

21 - 4 Uncommons

5 - 6 Commons

Cards 60
Avg. CMC 1.57
Folders Oldschool 1993/1994, Pre-Y2K
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