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Karador Lands Control

Commander / EDH*

orangejake

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Land (41)

Creature (22)

Instant (11)

Planeswalker (2)

Commander (1)

Commander: Karador, Ghost Chieftain

Sorcery (16)

Artifact (4)

Enchantment (3)

Maybeboard

Enchantment (2)

Sorcery (1)

A Karador Control deck with a heavy focus on Life from the Loam and similar effects. This is my attempt to make a deck centered entirely around Life from the Loam.

The main goal of this deck is to find one of Life from the Loam, Ranumap Excavator , or Crucible of Worlds, and use this to play fetch lands from your graveyard many times (especially with something like The Gitrog Monster, Wayward Swordtooth, or Oracle of Mul Daya in play). While attempting to accomplish this, you should be on the lookout for cards that get value from lands either coming into play, or leaving play (both will happen plenty).

This strategy will often leave you long on mana, and short on cards in hand. To avoid this, try to find one of the card draw engines (Nissa, Vital Force, The Gitrog Monster, and Tireless Tracker), Arch of Orzeca (which can be copied with Vesuva and Thespian's Stage), or one of the MLD spells --- in most cases this deck will be able to rebuild much faster than your opponents.

Late game Glacial Chasm makes it difficult for you to die in combat (especially if you copy Thespian's Stage with Vesuva, as then they would need three ways to interact with your lands in a single turn to break the lock). While turtling up with that card, you can either sit back on Arch of Orzeca, or be passively gaining benefit from the various landfall / land enters the graveyard creatures.

At some point, you attack with your army and win.

As this deck has a lot of tutors that tutor for any land in your deck, you'll need to figure out which lands to tutor for when. This won't be a strict order of which you should get, but the ones that I prioritize first will be listed first.

Any Fetch Land: If you land one of the land recursion spells, having a fetch land in your graveyard can easily result in fetching 5 + lands off of it. These land recursion spells should be priority tutors anyway, so getting the first fetchland in your graveyard is quite important.

If you're tutoring for the first fetchland, remember to pick one of Verdant Catacombs, Marsh Flats, and Windswept Heath, as the deck is Abzan.

Thespian's Stage: This card is fine by itself (comes into play untapped, although does only tap for colorless), and shines late game. Finding it early means that we can play Vesuva copying it as soon as we draw it, effectively giving us two copies of it.

Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth: This again is fine by itself, but tutoring it early means that Cabal Coffers becomes much stronger. This has the benefit that it also fixes our mana rather well, so it can sometimes be a better first tutor than Thespian's Stage (or even the initial fetchland, depending on the hand).

It also makes all of our lands that don't tap for mana tap for {B}, so can be a good first tutor if you already have cards like Maze of Ith or Dark Depths in hand.

After these, we mostly want to establish a strong (color wise) mana base early. Completing whatever "combos" you have (mostly Cabal Coffers + Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth or Dark Depths + Thespian's Stage ) can be good if it only takes a single tutor, but this will often also draw aggression towards yourself.

To deal with unwanted aggression, cards like Maze of Ith and Glacial Chasm are rather good. Avoid playing Glacial Chasm early, and try to only play Maze of Ith if you're already drawing aggro (it's effectively missing a land drop as it doesn't produce mana).

Vesuva: Note that Dark Depths + Vesuva is not a combo, so avoid doing that (Additionally, Vesuva targeting Glacial Chasm forces you to sac a land). Generally good targets for this are Thespian's Stage, Maze of Ith, Cabal Coffers, Arch of Orzeca, or any "normal" land. Vesuva on Bojuka Bog does get you the exile someone's graveyard trigger, which is good to keep in mind.

Vault of the Archangel: This deck can get low on life, so I've added some lifegain cards (including this). I'm not yet sure if this is worth it, but the main intention is the lifelink.

While many of these won't win the game on the spot, it's good to keep in mind how these cards interact as they can put you far ahead.
  1. MLD + Titania, Protector of Argoth or World Shaper.

Both work very well with things like Cataclysm (provided World Shaper dies to it, which shouldn't be hard). Note that the order that you sacrifice things to Death Cloud does matter --- as it sacrifices creatures first, Titania "won't see" the lands being sacrificed, which makes that synergy weaker.

Note that The Gitrog Monster doesn't read "when a land leaves the battlefield", so he has to be on the battlefield to "see" lands entering the graveyard. Moreover, even if multiple lands enter the graveyard at the same time, he only triggers once. He's mostly synergistic with things like fetch lands, and not with MLD.

  1. MLD + Wayward Swordtooth, Oracle of Mul Daya, or The Gitrog Monster; and Crucible of Worlds

Rebuild quickly after wiping everyone's lands, and then win from there. After wiping, things like Strip Mine and Wasteland can be used to keep everyone else low on mana. These shouldn't be used earlygame for solely mana denial purposes (hitting something that generates a lot of mana is usually good, but strip mining a basic is a net negative, as there are two players who are "effectively" a mana higher than you).

Additionally, after MLD you'll often be able to play Karador for 3 mana. This can let you start grinding out value out of your graveyard while your opponents stumble on mana.

  1. Dark Depths + Thespian's Stage . This combo is fairly well known, and the end result of it is that you sacrifice two lands to get a 20/20 flying, indestructible. Putting you back two lands is a pretty big cost, so you usually don't want to go for this early game.

Note that this 20/20 is especially good with Vault of the Archangel or Disciple of Bolas, and can gain you a lot of life quickly.

Crop Rotation can allow for some massive blow outs, via finding lands like Bojuka Bog or Glacial Chasm. Crop Rotation can also find Thespian's Stage or Vesuva to "protect" an important land from disruption (or potentially make a 20/20 at instant speed).

For this reason, I usually try to hold onto my Crop Rotation until late game, as it becomes much stronger than something like Sylvan Scrying in the late game (when sacrificing a land doesn't matter as much), but is much weaker early on.

Some Crop Rotation targets (to sacrifice) are better than others. Try to sacrifice Riftstone Portal or Bojuka Bog above other cards (unless you really need the black mana). Vesuva can be a good sacrifice as well if it's copying something meh.

Entomb has a decent amount of targets in this deck. I'll ignore synergies like Eternal Witness or Renegade Rallier (or even Karador, Ghost Chieftain) as they seem obvious.

One of the best early Entomb targets is Life from the Loam, and this is the main reason the deck runs Entomb. If you already have a life from the loam, Entomb is rather good at tutoring for specific lands. Remember that Riftstone Portal is a possibility to fix your mana if required.

Vengeful Pharoah is additionally a rather fun target, and is an odd card in general (it's mostly good at filling a similar role to Maze of Ith in dissuading people from attacking you. Make sure to point out when it goes into your graveyard, as otherwise people can get annoyed).

Worm Harvest can also be rather good, and can generate a lot of chump blockers (and has synergy with Vault of the Archangel's deathtouch).

This deck is still a work in progress, and the following are points that I'm still thinking about:

  1. The Birthing Pod chain in the deck seems rather weak. The deck especially has the issue of not having good 1 or 2 drops to Pod into, while having a lot of 3 drops. This might merit changing some of the 3 drops into lower CMC creatures, but it's not obvious to me how to do this while keeping the same effect and interacting well with pod (so Reclamation Sage -> Qasali Pridemage wouldn't be that great of a change, as Qasali has to sac himself to destroy an artifact/enchantment). It could be that Birthing Pod just isn't worth running, I'm not sure yet. If I did cut it, I'm currently thinking about replacing it with Seasons Past.

  2. This deck has had issues with lifegain in the past. I've added Fracturing Gust and Vault of the Archangel to try to fix this, and am not yet sure how good this change is.

  3. Pir's Whim seems underwhelming, but I haven't tried it yet in an actual game.

  4. The deck seems rather heavy on 5+ drops, and has an average CMC of > 3, which doesn't seem ideal. On the other hand, many of the cheap cards have "search your library for a land" in them, and the deck runs board wipes (and early creatures, especially 3CMC ones) to interact with its opponents, so maybe it's alright.

  5. The deck can have rather clunky hands early, which might be due to it not running enough lands / early card draw. This could be another form of the above point, and it's possible that I should cut down on the number of high CMC cards in the deck for more draw to "smooth" out the game.

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