Lord Windgrace Sits Behind A Chasm

Commander / EDH BRG (Jund) Dark Depths Lands Ramp

Ehsteve

Land (43)

• 1x Ancient Tomb
• 1x Barren Moor
• 1x Blast Zone
• 1x Blood Crypt
• 1x Bloodstained Mire
• 1x Bojuka Bog
• 1x Boseiju, Who Shelters All
• 1x Cabal Coffers
• 1x Command Tower
• 1x Dakmor Salvage
• 1x Dark Depths
• 1x Fabled Passage
• 1x Field of the Dead
• 5x Forest
• 1x Ghost Quarter
• 1x Glacial Chasm
• 1x Golgari Rot Farm
• 1x Gruul Turf
• 1x Homeward Path
• 1x Maze of Ith
• 1x Mountain
• 1x Nurturing Peatland
• 1x Overgrown Tomb
• 1x Petrified Field
• 1x Prismatic Vista
• 1x Reliquary Tower
• 1x Spire Garden
• 1x Stomping Ground
• 1x Strip Mine
• 2x Swamp
• 1x Thespian's Stage
• 1x Throne of the High City
• 1x Tranquil Thicket
• 1x Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth
• 1x Verdant Catacombs
• 1x Vesuva
• 1x Wasteland
• 1x Wooded Foothills

Creature (19)

• 1x Acidic Slime
• 1x Azusa, Lost but Seeking
• 1x Courser of Kruphix
• 1x Dread Presence
• 1x Dryad of the Ilysian Grove
• 1x Elvish Reclaimer
• 1x Eternal Witness
• 1x Kodama of the East Tree
• 1x Lotus Cobra
• 1x Oracle of Mul Daya
• 1x Ramunap Excavator
• 1x Scute Swarm
• 1x Sylvan Safekeeper
• 1x The Gitrog Monster
• 1x Tireless Tracker
• 1x Titania, Protector of Argoth
• 1x Ulvenwald Hydra
• 1x World Breaker
• 1x World Shaper

Instant (11)

• 1x Assassin's Trophy
• 1x Beast Within
• 1x Bedevil
• 1x Constant Mists
• 1x Crop Rotation
• 1x Grapple with the Past
• 1x Harrow
• 1x Heroic Intervention
• 1x Realms Uncharted
• 1x Vampiric Tutor
• 1x Windgrace's Judgment

Artifact (2)

• 1x Crucible of Worlds
• 1x Sol Ring

Commander (1)

Sorcery (16)

• 1x Agadeem's Awakening  ^Flip
• 1x Bala Ged Recovery
• 1x Beseech the Queen
• 1x Blasphemous Act
• 1x Damnation
• 1x Demonic Tutor
• 1x Exsanguinate
• 1x Hour of Promise
• 1x Life from the Loam
• 1x Pir's Whim
• 1x Scapeshift
• 1x Splendid Reclamation
• 1x Tempt with Discovery
• 1x Torment of Hailfire
• 1x Toxic Deluge
• 1x Traverse the Ulvenwald

Enchantment (5)

• 1x Burgeoning
• 1x Exploration
• 1x Pernicious Deed
• 1x Prismatic Omen
• 1x Valakut Exploration

Planeswalker (3)

• 1x Nissa of Shadowed Boughs
• 1x Nissa, Vital Force
• 1x Wrenn and Six

Maybeboard

Land (9)

• 1x Castle Garenbrig
• 1x Castle Locthwain
• 1x Cragcrown Pathway  ^Flip
• 1x Lotus Field
• 1x Nesting Grounds
• 1x Thriving Bluff
• 1x Thriving Grove
• 1x Thriving Moor
• 1x Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle

Creature (5)

• 1x Ancient Greenwarden
• 1x Korvold, Fae-Cursed King
• 1x Multani, Yavimaya's Avatar
• 1x Ob Nixilis, the Fallen
• 1x Vorinclex, Voice of Hunger

Artifact (2)

• 1x Cloudstone Curio
• 1x Mirage Mirror

Sorcery (3)

• 1x Cleansing Wildfire
• 1x Reap and Sow
• 1x Sylvan Scrying

Enchantment (2)

• 1x Ayula's Influence
• 1x Helix Pinnacle

Instant (1)

• 1x Valakut Awakening  ^Flip

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The usual land-matters style Windgrace deck focused less around land destruction and subgames rather than simply outlasting your opponents behind a Glacial Chasm and then finishing them by either sacrificing the Glacial Chasm to its own upkeep trigger and swinging for the win or going for it without the need to go shields down with a variety of synergies like:

• Big 'ol Torment of Hailfire or Exsanguinate,
• Ramunap Excavator or Crucible of Worlds + Glacial Chasm to minimise life lost to Glacial Chasm upkeep,
• Dark Depths + Thespian's Stage (the classic),
• Glacial Chasm + Throne of the High City to remain the eternal monarch!

Generally speaking the deck is not fast, but ramps out fairly consistently and just sits behind the Glacial Chasm which makes this land the backbone of most strategies. Protect it at all costs and be wary of any time it would enter the graveyard so that you don't fall foul of any graveyard hate sitting on the battlefield or in your opponents' hand. The best time to go for it with cycling the Glacial Chasm through the graveyard to reset age counters is when you have any of the instant speed ways to retrieve the chasm, such as Petrified Field or Grapple with the Past to prevent it being exiled. Over the course of most games, the damage prevention will often far exceed whatever upkeep costs you have to pay for Glacial Chasm. Most decks have very few ways to interact with land or only a few kill spells like Assassin's Trophy or maybe a Vindicate but it takes a conceited effort to take out a Glacial Chasm, so either try to fly under the radar for long enough that you simply get ignored while the other player fight amongst themselves or try to ally with another player by providing removal or ramp with political cards like Pir's Whim or board hugging with Rites of Flourishing.

Other ways are to use your own land to deal with permanents providing issues such as Alchemist's Refuge, Academy Ruins or Yavimaya Hollow in the land category or maybe proactively removing their own Wastelands or Strip Mines with yours to clear the way for a Glacial Chasm. Searching out a Bojuka Bog at instant speed with a Crop Rotation is a great way of dealing with graveyard strategies and hopefully Homeward Path should come in handy in the case that your opponent steals creatures from your board or graveyard.

Most of the time Lord Windgrace will be the target of any ill-will your opponents have (even your allies) and often his ultimate it lacklustre at best and will only aggravate the board further. It is best to only pull out Windgrace as a way to:

• Retrieve utility land (such Maze of Ith, Homeward Path, Reliquary Tower, Petrified Field or a bounce land) from the graveyard if you have no other ways to do so in hand or on the board,
• Ramp,
• Turn those lands into spells by discarding to the uptick.

The only effective way to protect Lord Windgrace I've found is to use Constant Mists to fog attacks as often your opponents will have larger and more effective board presence than you until the late game so don't put too much faith in your creature's ability to block (they are your best value engines). Maze of Ith comes in handy with dealing with singular attackers, but don't expect this to be an effective defense for long as it cannot deal with multiple attackers or anything equipped with Lightning Greaves or Swiftfoot Boots.

One trick to watch out for are effects that stifle damage prevention like Skullcrack or a large enough Banefire. While these cards may not see common play in EDH/Commander there is very little the deck can do once these effects resolve.

More than happy to receive further suggestions, but for the sake of wanting to keep in the spirit of the usual circle of local players am refraining from the usual mass land destruction inclusions such as Jokulhaups or Decree of Annihilation.

Primer WIP

Windgrace, a quick overview Show

Lord Windgrace

Lord Windgrace does effectively only two things, and does them well:

1. Recur land cards from the graveyard
2. Ramp

These abilities are pretty much go hand in hand with any land-matters, strategies which relies upon getting specific land cards from the graveyard to the battlefield or generally just ramping.

In a pinch you can turn land cards in your hand into two draws, but this is generally only when you have very little going on, as the discard is mandatory. From experience, his ultimate is usually lackluster and will only draw the ire of the board, when Lord Windgrace just likes sitting back and doing his own thing.

Then there's his colour identity: BRG/Jund/.

Black grants unconditional tutors, boardwipes, limited mana acceleration and reanimation/reanimation enablers. Green gives you access to ramp, creature/land searching, other land-matter cards and big stompy creatures. Red gives you access to reach, damage-based wipes, wheels/looting and land destruction.

What this all adds up to is a broad range of strategies: reanimation, ramp/lands matter and land destruction whilst also having access to board wipes and the best tutors to find what you need.

Strategies

As discussed previously without trying to be overly-general Windgrace decks fall into three broad categories: Reanimation, Land Matter and Land Destruction.

You can mix and match these strategies, but I've found from my own experience that if you want an effective EDH deck that doesn't just tread water, you'll want to focus on one strategy and do it really well.

Reanimation

Reanimation is rather straightforward: you try to cheat/reduce the mana cost of a creature by utilising reanimation effects (that cost less than the casting cost of the creature) to put that creature onto the battlefield from the graveyard. This is doubly effective because at the same time you can treat the graveyard as an extension of your hand. This means you can turn looting effects into quasi-card advantage, and wheel effects that might be devastating to your opponent's carefull crafted hands can instead enable you to access to reanimation resources along with potential graveyard fodder to punish your opponents with.

Combined with access to quick mana from ramp (especially if you have access to quick self-milling effects to take advantage of Lord Windgrace's tickdown). Along with a looting effects and tutors, you can get to that sweet spot for reanimation which means you can make the most out of your graveyard without having to do all the hard work involved in paying the full mana cost. This also gives certain creatures a degree of resilience, so that even if they are removed, you have the opportunity to return them to the battlefield to wreak havoc once more!

Lands-Matter

Lands-matter is a little less to the point (and this backs a lot into the land destruction discussion but I digress): historically WotC has been hesitant to print a lot of spells that destroy or interact with lands as they are the primary resource that allows players to well...play the game!

There are several notorious offenders, such as Wasteland, Strip Mine or Sinkhole, but these effects are limited in number. Instead what more contemporaneous cards tend to do (like Field of Ruin or Ghost Quarter) is exchange non-basic lands for basic lands, allowing you to punish 'greedy' mana bases without hurting less ambitious mana bases.

Most land-destruction effects are very symmetrical, its either a land-for-a-land (Strip Mine), or destroying EVERYONE's land (Jokulhaups).

What lands-matter is trying to do is exploit this historic lack of interaction with land and use it to render a lot of your opponents cards useless, a kind of quasi-card advantage. These decks try to ramp and toolbox out specific lands (Glacial Chasm, Cabal Coffers, Dark Depths, Field of the Dead etc) and along with a choice of specific creatures (Dread Presence, The Gitrog Monster, Titania, Protector of Argoth etc) these can create a powerful synergy. Land and lands-matter ETBs can be rather difficult to stop because lands don't use the stack when they are played, and so will always trigger, and will afford your opponents fewer opportunities to slide in counters or other effects which might otherwise put a spanner in the works.

Lands-matter is entirely synergy-based. There are no game-ending infinite combos (by my account) but there are a lot of interactions that are difficult to deal with.

Land Destruction

Land destruction is from a meta perspective more of a sub-game: attacking your opponent's mana base one land at a time can cripple their ability to remain on curve and keep up with others. The longer a game goes, the less effective this strategy can become.

This is why the more popular land destruction choices come in the form of mass land destruction, and will usually annihilate their controller's creatures along with their mana base (see: Jokulhaups).

What this then comes down to is who can rebuild their board the fastest and exploit this temporary lack of battlefield presence. Lord Windgrace, with the ability to pull lands from the graveyard to the battlefield two at a time in addition to being able to make your land drops every turn as normal, is a prime candidate for this task.

It is a numbers game, and generally you will rely upon your opponent stumbling on their mana for several turns or having kept in their hand less devastation spells, or spells that will now be out of reach for many turns if they can only make one land drop a turn.

A quick summary of the above is that Lord Windgrace can give you the ability to break the symmetry of a mass land destruction spell!

Land Strats Show

Ramp

Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth + Cabal Coffers: This is the core synergy you should be working to for all your big-mana plays. With access to all the land tutors available, along with general tutors like Demonic Tutor and Vampiric Tutor this is very easy to assemble, and with the extra lands you can accrue from ticking down Lord Windgrace this is the most straight-forward way to maximize you mana to enable whatever shenanigans you're planning. Add in a Thespian's Stage or Vesuva and you can have access to multiple Cabal Coffers as it is not a legendary land.

Ancient Tomb / City of Traitors / Scorched Ruins / Lotus Vale / Lotus Field / Bounce lands (Golgari Rot Farm etc): These are lands which tap for 2 or more but have conditions either making their mana either costly, slow or painful. Lands with ETB sacrifice requirements like Scorched Ruins, Lotus Vale or Lotus Field require careful timing, but can be a great way to fill the graveyard with lands when necessary. City of Traitors has the least restrictions on ETB, however with the amount of lands you'll be playing this will often find its way to the graveyard. Most of the loops are too slow to really exploit City of Traitors as a ramp land, but it could also be used as a quasi-utility land from how easy it is to sacrifice, but then again a fetch land would serve the same function with better colour fixing. Finally Ancient Tomb is just a painful land, which I've found can end up being far too painful in the end with Glacial Chasm even if it is fantastic as an early game play.

Utility Land

Blast Zone: Not the best solution for dealing with tokens, but in a pinch it's a fantastic way to deal with nonland permanents that are making you life difficult. It is a far more tailored solution than Pernicious Deed but also far harder for your opponents to stop.

Bojuka Bog: This is a fantastic way to deal with graveyard strategies your opponents may employ. It is a land so there no space in which to throw a counter to prevent the triggered ability, so you're opponents only way out is to be either hexproof, or to stifle the triggered ability.

Boseiju, Who Shelters All: If you need to resolve a specific instant or sorcery against any deck playing counterspells, this should be you go-to land. It doesn't protect against effects that copy, gain control of or bounce the spell (like Venser, Shaper Savant) but it's a broad solution when you otherwise have very limited options.

Cycling lands (Tranquil Thicket etc): In a pinch you can turn a land card into something better, the instant speed cycling is key to their utility

Dakmor Salvage: If you need to self-mill for access to more lands for Lord Windgrace to bring back with his tick down or for reanimation, this is a fantastic strategy. You can also pitch to Lord Windgrace and dredge for the draw if needed.

Deserted Temple: Works great with lands that can generate multiple mana in a turn, for example Cabal Coffers or Lotus Field. It only generates colourless mana so you should be wary that this doesn't affect your mana fixing by itself.

Drownyard Temple: Think of this like a second Darkmor Salvage. It will rarely end up netting you mana but it is probably the single best land to use with The Gitrog Monster in particular for the upkeep sacrifice trigger. Personally I've found that this takes too much mana and effort to recur every time to make it a really effective card outside a couple of corner cases.

Ghost Quarter / Field of Ruin / Wasteland / Strip Mine / Tectonic Edge / Dust Bowl: These all pretty much do the same thing, just in slightly different ways. Their main objective is to remove the utility lands of your opponents such as Alchemist's Refuge, Yavimaya Hollow or their own land removal. Of course the best are Strip Mine and Wasteland however don't underestimate the fact that you can fix your mana with Field of Ruin or Ghost Quarter if you're in a tight spot. Dust Bowl and Tectonic Edge are budget options in this category.

Homeward Path: Under-utilised but very powerful ability which effectively undoes effects which steal your and your opponent's creatures. Great against YOINK decks and abilities that steal creatures from graveyards like Sheoldred, Whispering One. This will be useless against abilities like The Scarab God which create token copies but I would consider those corner cases. If you opponent is swinging out against you or an ally with creatures that don't belong to them, simply return them to their rightful owner!

Maze of Ith / Thaumatic Compass   / Labyrinth of Skophos: As long as the threats don't have hexproof/shroud or other shenaningans preventing them from being targeted you can use these to make attacks whiff hard. These won't stop attack triggers but will buy you time. Alternatively they are very good political cards allowing you to defend allies in a pinch. Maze of Ith may be the best and most straightforward option however remember that it does not tap for mana without an Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth or similar effect so it is not the best card to see in your opening hand. Search these out only when necessary.

Mirrorpool: This card can have two important roles: protecting an instant or sorcery after your opponents play a counter or doubling up an effect which otherwise wouldn't be enough to end the game because your mana just isn't quite there yet. However it is a colourless source that enters tapped, so don't expect this to save you at instant speed - this kind of play requires careful planning.

Petrified Field: Very important ability as it is usable at instant speed and is itself a land. This is a repeatable effect with Lord Windgrace allowing you to create loops of sacrificing and returning land to retrieving lands which have been milled. In a bind this also allow you to instant speed return important utility land like Glacial Chasm to hand in response to another player wiping your graveyard.

Reliquary Tower: A very 'your mileage may vary' type card. Sometimes this land is golden, other times not so much, it depends on whether your opponents are utilising group-hug effects which make you draw obscene amounts of cards or maybe it's after a really good turn with The Gitrog Monster. It only generates colourless mana so it is best not to search out this land unless necessary

Thespian's Stage / Vesuva: Lands with the ability to copy other lands are a great way to create redundancies in effects. Maybe your opponent is going for an all-out swing with their creatures even though you have a Glacial Chasm out, which probably means that they have removal for it (such as Beast Within or Chaos Warp). In response you can copy the land and hopefully survive what would have otherwise been a disastrous loss. Vesuva have a slightly different purpose in that it is able to copy ETB effects as well so it has greater utility in that is can copy bounce lands, however it cannot as easily swap between effects without setting up a recursion loop by sacrificing/retrieving it/playing it (usually at sorcery speed).

Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle: A land that bolts. If you're playing a Prismatic Omen or Dryad of the Ilysian Grove you can meet the 5 mountain requirement a lot quicker. Adding this to the deck requires doing a bit of maths to figure out how often it is actually going to be effective.

Volrath's Stronghold: A way to protect your creatures from reanimation by your opponents (such as Sheoldred, Whispering One along with being able to get back creatures on top of your library.

WIP

Synergies

Dark Depths + Thespian's Stage:

Field of the Dead + ANYTHING: 100% value, because you'll be running far more than seven different named lands just go for it as an easy addition.

Throne of the High City + Glacial Chasm: Once you're the monarch the only way it can be removed is by another player using an effect to become a monarch or dealing combat damage to you. The first scenario is unlikely and in the case of the second with Glacial Chasm it is nearly impossible for you to lose the monarchy!

WIP

Top Ranked	Achieved #66 position overall 2 years ago Achieved #1 position in Commander / EDH BRG (Jund) 1 year ago Achieved #1 position in Commander / EDH Lands 1 year ago Achieved #1 position in Commander / EDH Ramp 1 year ago
Date added	2 years
Last updated	3 weeks
Legality	This deck is Commander / EDH legal.
Rarity (main - side)	23 - 0 Mythic Rares 47 - 0 Rares 14 - 0 Uncommons 8 - 0 Commons
Cards	100
Avg. CMC	3.26
Tokens	Clue, 20/20 Avatar, Monarch, Wrenn, 3/3 Beast, 5/3 Elemental, 2/2 Zombie, Nissa, 1/1 Insect, 2/2 Cat Warrior
Folders	Commander, Commander, Commander, Favourites, Jund EDH, Other deck ideas, EDH, Lord Windgrace EDH, Windgrace Inspiration, Lands, See all 12