INTRO
This deck isn't your typical Lands deck with 10 different ways to win. It doesn't win from making a bunch of tokens off of landfall triggers. Cards like Avenger of Zendikar, Rampaging Baloths, Sylvan Awakening, and Natural Affinity are all very powerful and can be very fun, but they're all too common for my taste. I wanted this deck to be more focused and unique, yet still very powerful.
In regards to the commanders, Vial Smasher gives me value off of casting my spells, and Thrasios is a mana sink for when I run out of gas or need to filter through my deck for answers! (Note: This deck almost became a Korvold, Fae-Cursed King deck whenever he came out but I couldn’t let go of blue.)
WIN CONDITIONS
The primary win condition for this deck is to simply fill your yard with lands and bring them back to smash people in the face with direct damage or life drain. We do this by using 1 of 4 cards. whichever is most viable in the situation: Valakut Exploration, Ob Nixilis, the Fallen, Retreat to Hagra, or Tunneling Geopede. The way we will get our lands into the graveyard is simply by playing our ramp spells, gain some value, and use cards like Squandered Resources, Reprocess, and Rain of Filth to sacrifice those lands for mana or card draw. Scapeshift can be a great shortcut a bunch of lands into our graveyard as well as a bunch of lands into play. Boundless Realms is also a great way to shortcut a bunch of lands into play! Then we get to our star card. The card that the entire deck is built around. Splendid Reclamation. Worst case scenario, sacrificing and returning all of our lands to play will gain us a ton of value from creatures like Tatyova, Benthic Druid, and Lotus Cobra. Best case scenario, the lands entering will trigger Valakut Exploration, Ob Nixilis, Rereat to Hagra, or Tunneling Geopede to win the game if we have them in play. We will be able to do this multiple times as long as our sac outlets remain in play and we can somehow recast Splendid Reclamation. We can do this by playing cards like Yawgmoth's Will, Underworld Breach, Regrowth, Noxious Revival, Reap, or my favorite Volcanic Vision.
Disclaimer! Torment of Hailfire is incredible in this deck, but I hate playing it. It was a backup win condition, but it has been removed.
As a side note, there is 1 other unintentional way to win. It can be very useful in an end game or if my main win cons have been thwarted (lands in graveyard exiled, splendid reclamation exiled, torment of hailfire exiled, etc). Normally, this card is only used to untap my lands and give me explosive ramp:
-It is casting Rude Awakening entwined. Again, Rude Awakening is in the deck for explosive ramp, but turning 20-30 lands into creatures last minute can be very powerful.
COMBO
There is one somewhat infinite combo in the deck, but it can be tough to pull off, because it is a 5 card combo. I crafted this combo myself. It is my favorite combo in Magic, and you can't find this anywhere else online than right here. This may very well be the first representation of it. The combo involves Underworld Breach, Squandered Resources, Lotus Cobra, Splendid Reclamation, and Windfall.
Assuming there are multiple cards in the graveyard and that Lotus Cobra as well as Squandered Resources are both on the field, you would cast Underworld Breach. At this point you can tap your lands for mana and then sacrifice all of your lands to Squandered Resources for extra mana. Cast Splendid Reclamation to return them and trigger Lotus Cobra. This will net you more mana than you began with. Sacrafice the lands again for EVEN MORE MANA and cast Windfall. This will fill your graveyard with more cards. Dumping our hand with Windfall over and over is important, because we can now use these cards and Underworld Breach to escape Windfall and Splendid Reclamation over and over. This gives us infinite mana and card draw.
It's important that we draw into one of the landfall pingers mentioned above so that we can start dealing damage to all of our opponents when the lands re-enter. I said somewhat infinite, because it's only as infinite as our deck size, which is 98 cards in this case!
UTILITY
Valakut Exploration is by far one of my favorite cards in the deck. It’s one of my win cons, BUT it’s not a card that I would wait to put into play like the other 3 pingers simply because of how versatile it is! The amount of sudo card draw we get off of this is mind blowing!
The last card I want to mention is Green Sun's Zenith. I know it seems like a weird include in a spell slinger deck that has a focus on lands, but there's only a few creatures in this deck, and all of them are very valuable. GSZ allows us to have access to almost all of those creatures whenever we want.
Feed back and suggestions are welcome. Thanks in advance!
If you like a more focused/combo style deck, you'd love this next deck! Check it out:
Competitive Taigam Deck (Persistent Petitioners)
