[ATW] Landstill

[jazzykat]

You know, with all this discussion about this deck I am mystified by the fact that no one has mentioned Teferri's Response. While I realize it's narrow, it much less narrow because you rely on lands for everything and an opponent that has a chance of beating you has to either A. Totally ignore you and run you over (i.e. combo) B. Effectively deal with your kill condition.

Anyway, I put 2 in the board and I can't tell you how funny they are to side in and always have the opponent wondering if their bolt or wasteland is going to turn into an ancestral recall for me!

[Solpugid]

Wasteland isn't all that detrimental, unless recurred, and bolt can't even kill monastery so teferi's response may be overkill. But against rishadan port it's THE best answer. Not only does it stop the land from being tapped, and draw you cards, it destroys the port. I could therefore see running two in the board, but no more than that. How many were you considering?

[jazzykat]

Wasteland isn't all that detrimental, unless recurred, and bolt can't even kill monastery so teferi's response may be overkill. But against rishadan port it's THE best answer. Not only does it stop the land from being tapped, and draw you cards, it destroys the port. I could therefore see running two in the board, but no more than that. How many were you considering?

2 in the board is what I have used to some success. It stops everything that target your land (that can be responded to) STP, sinkhole, wasteland, port, smother, parallex wave, etc.

[AnduYn]

Hey guys!

I've been playing this deck for a couple of weeks now and i really love it!

But there were always two cards that seemed to be less powerfull than the rest of the deck.

Diabolic Edict and Stifle. They can be really good in certain situations, but they don't have the words "I win" written on them like pernicious deed, and I really wanted to have more cards that finish your opponent right away or bring you into a game position where it is only a matter of time until you can finish the game. So I slightly changed the 4C Landsstill, inspired by the Wish Landstill posted a few days ago:



Enlightened Wish Landstill:

Lands:

3 Polluted
4 Strand
1 Savannah
4 Tundra
3 Underground Sea
2 Tropical Island
3 Nantuko Monastery
4 Mishra's factory

Spells:

4 Swords
4 Brainstorms
4 Force of will
4 Standstill
4 Counterspell
2 Fact of Fiction
4 Pernicious Deed
2 Humility
1 Engeneered explosives
1 Vedalken Shackles
1 Crucible of Worlds
3 Cunning Wish
2 Enlightened Tutor

SB:

3 Engeneered Plague
3 Leyline of the void (metagame call could be 2 meddling mages and 1 Arcane Laboratory if you fear combo)
1 Planar Void (One planar void, to be able to search it with enlightened tutorand play it on your second turn to beat Loam and Ichorid)
1 Circle of Pro: Red
1 Fact or Fiction
1 Pact of negation
1 Slaughter Pact
1 Pulse of the fields
1 Disentchant
1 Extirpate
1 Enlightened Tutor



Humility is kind of hard to cast, but if you have the right mana, it wins every aggro/aggro-control matchup on its own, and keeps your opponet down permanently, not just for a few turns like pernicious deed. And if you really can't cast it, just fetch something else with the enlighened, or the wish.

The wishes and the enlightened tutors offer you answers to almost everything. And you can easily get you silver bullets, like CoP:Red,Planar void, Extirpate,Humility,Vedalken Shackles,Pulse etc..

I have not tested the cunning wishes that much, that`s why I want to hear some voices weather or not they are playable. That far they were awsome, even against Gobbos, where you can fetch the enlightened and then search the humility.


The only Problems I see so far are that you wreck your sideboard and that the wish makes Landstills mid to late game better, but that`s where the deck shines anyway.I am more confident with Enlightened Tutor and Humility they seem to be matchwinner you need against all creature based decks. So why is noone playing them in 4c Landstill?


I hope I will get some replys, what people think about adding Enlightened Tutor and/or Cunning wish to this deck! Thanks!


I am open for all forms of replys, feel free to criticize my build, or make suggestions for tuning it, because it is far from being perfect. My meta is full of Belcher, Fish, Thresh, Zoo, Mono Black and Life from the loam decks, but Loam is more common then combo.


Apology for my awful English.

Greetz!

[Anarky87]

Went 3-2 today at a tournament, losing to a Sligh deck and a burn deck with MD Price of Progress. Still made third though. The Sligh deck then boarded in Price of Progress. I beat Aluren, some RG deck, and a 5c Sliver deck.

[Shriekmaw]

H

Enlightened Wish Landstill:

Lands:

3 Polluted
4 Strand
1 Savannah
4 Tundra
3 Underground Sea
2 Tropical Island
3 Nantuko Monastery
4 Mishra's factory

Spells:

4 Swords
4 Brainstorms
4 Force of will
4 Standstill
4 Counterspell
2 Fact of Fiction
4 Pernicious Deed
2 Humility
1 Engeneered explosives
1 Vedalken Shackles
1 Crucible of Worlds
3 Cunning Wish
2 Enlightened Tutor

I would like to mention a few quick points about the decklist above. The don't believe Humility is a good enough card in order to main deck in Landstill. I believe its a great sideboard card, but I would not run it main.

The mana base scares me a little for two reasons. First, I believe the fetch lands a a little high by 1 or 2, I believe sometimes you might get stuck finding the right color land especially since your thinning the deck out by quite a bit by running all those fetches. I believe the mirror match is quite awful, since all your mana sources are susceptible to wasteland.

Maybe, your metagame is a lot different than the one that I'm used to in Syracuse, but this deck in incapable of winning the mirror which is why I wouldn't be too trilled if I actually played it in a local tourney over here.

Here are the improvements I would recommend. I would totally drop the enlightened tutors from the deck to provide more room for explosives. I absolutely love this card in Landstill. Forget about the green in the deck for monastery and sideboard usage, and strictly focus on a more stable mana base. I really believe decree of justice and eternal dragons is pretty essential in this deck. I'm still up in the air on cunning wish, but I believe it does make the deck very versatile against a changing metagame.

[Tacosnape]

In light of my recent loss with 4C Landstill, I've been on search of a means to diversify my kill conditions. I don't believe Mishra's Factory and Nantuko Monestary alone are enough.

So I've been trying everything, and I mean everything, from a lone Faerie Conclave, to Quagnoth, to Decree of Justice, to Eternal Dragon, to Haunting Echoes, to Blinking Spirit, to Rude Awakening, to Vorosh. All of this testing in mostly Landstill mirrors.

What I've come up with is this:

1. If you want to win the Landstill mirror, you have to be packing at least one Wasteland, and it helps drastically to have either Decree of Justice or Engineered Explosives. Extirpates in multiples help, and Vedalken Shackles is pretty good, too.

2. Run Gifts Ungiven.

The biggest knock on Gifts Ungiven is that for 4 mana, unless you have three different approaches to something, Gifts won't automatically grab you the card you need. The second biggest knock on it is that it's competing for slots with Fact or Fiction and Intuition.

To which I say "So what?" and "Gifts is better," respectively.

Gifts does what Intuition does with Loam, only better. Gifts will grab Life from the Loam and all your techy 1-of lands, be they Wasteland, Cephalid Coliseum, Factory, Monestary, Conclave, Maze, Academy Ruins, Mirrodin's Core (Techy against people who Extirpate Dual Lands!), or whatever. This lets you get your anti-control engine rolling.

If you're missing a color of land, Gifts gets it, by grabbing Flooded Strand, Polluted Delta, the Dual of that Color, and any other card.

Gifts refills your hand of random staples, especially when your opponent doesn't know what you're holding. A Gifts for STP/Counterspell/Deed/Edict will net you -something- useful against all the random jank in the format.

Gifts also lets you run all kinds of random 1-of's. A single Chainer's Edict becomes pretty good in Landstill. A single Engineered Explosives can be added to allow a guaranteed Deed/CrimeandPunishment/EE/??? Gifts. Vindicate and Krosan Grip become intriguing single shots.

This leaves us with Gifts against Fact or Fiction.

Gifts will always get you exactly two cards. Fact or Fiction will -usually- get you two, because most players will leave you with a 2/3 split where the 2 is slightly better than the 3. There are exceptions, of course. Fact or Fiction will sometimes get you 4 if you seem to be in a situation where you're holding an answer card (Deed) and Fact or Fiction into a Deed and 4 other cards. You can then take the 4 and play the Deed in your hand. But most players will minimize the damage by sending a weaker card to stand alongside the Deed.

Gifts, however, will get you weapons in the right build. I think it's definitely worth trying as the compromise between Fact or Fiction's mega draw power and Intuition's Loam tech.

EDIT: I know that I said the only lands you should ever run in 4C Landstill are ones that produce colored mana or kill your opponent, but when I said this, hardly anybody in the country played Landstill. Now it's growing on trees. I still keep my personal build minimized though.

[from Cairo]

Wouldn't Cunning Wish open up alot of similar options as Gifts without clogging up MD slots with cards you don't want to randomly be drawing (read as: Krosan Grip, Vindicate, Extripate, etc) and it would cost one less mana to guarentee that you're getting the answer you need into your hand rather than 2/4ths of your choices. I mean you can run a Terror/Edict/Smother, and Krosan Grip/Dismantilling Blow, some Extripate, Stifle, Tefari's Response, Fact or Fiction maybe an Argivian Find for getting back an Explosives/Deed. Each of these cards excels at what it's supposed to do, but is probably too limited to warrant MD spots, it seems like Cunning Wish does the silver bullet thing better, since it leaves the MD clear of situational utility draws, and allows access to more specialized answers.

I'm just thinking if you're staring down a Tarmogoyf, and cast Gifts for Swords, Edict, Deed, Explosives, chances are you're not getting Swords, or Edict if they only have the Goyf out, so you're spending on Gifts, and - on EE/Deed plus on activating it, so - mana, when you could Cunning Wish for Smother, and spend , granted you're getting another card, but it's always going to be the two least useful cards in the eyes of you're opponent.

And its not going to be specialized cards, it's generally going to be more broad cards, that as a result of having wider use are more expensive to cast. I'm having a hard time phrasing that part, but I mean the MD runs answers that are more general than limited so that it has less dead draws, so as a result you're going to be tutoring for more expensive, less specialized answers. I think if going a silver bullet route Cunning Wish > Gifts.

[Tacosnape]

I'm just thinking if you're staring down a Tarmogoyf, and cast Gifts for Swords, Edict, Deed, Explosives, chances are you're not getting Swords, or Edict if they only have the Goyf out, so you're spending on Gifts, and - on EE/Deed plus on activating it, so - mana, when you could Cunning Wish for Smother, and spend , granted you're getting another card, but it's always going to be the two least useful cards in the eyes of you're opponent.

You're missing the point.

Yes, Cunning Wish is ungodly at Silver bullets, and so is Intuition. The point of Gifts is that you actually net card advantage from it where you don't from the Wish or Intuition. Gifts Ungiven isn't really a tutor unless you're tutoring for your Loam engine. It's a card advantage engine, much like Fact or Fiction, with the added bonus of being able to snag Loam and any three bullets you want to abuse with Loam.

About 90% of the time, you're already going to have the answer to that Tarmogoyf in your hand. Your opponent probably doesn't know what answer you have. Therefore they're either going to counter the Gifts Ungiven, in which case your answer is far more likely to get rid of the Tarmogoyf, or you can grab some random combination like STP/Edict/Standstill/Force.

This puts the opponent on a choice. Either they have to hand you the perfect answer to that Tarmogoyf in STP or Edict, or give you a Standstill and a Force for 4 mana. I'll take fetching a Standstill and a Force for 4 mana, considering with all the hordes of removal in my deck, chances are I've got at least 1, and now I have a Force backing it up, and if I kill that Goyf, I'm getting 3 more cards from Standstill.

[from Cairo]

Yea, I guess if you just look at it as a Fact or Fiction replacement its ok, I don't know that its better than Fact or Fiction or not, but its another option to consider. Fact digs 5 cards out versus 4, but the Gifts 4 are all going to be business cards (assuming you want them all to be) and FoF will hit land and such.

Gifts also lets you run all kinds of random 1-of's. A single Chainer's Edict becomes pretty good in Landstill. A single Engineered Explosives can be added to allow a guaranteed Deed/CrimeandPunishment/EE/??? Gifts. Vindicate and Krosan Grip become intriguing single shots.

I was mostly responding to the above part where you were suggesting running random 1 of's: Krosan Grip, Vindicate, etc., which as it was presented seemed like you were using it as a toolbox/tutor effect. I think diluting the MD with cards like that is a weaker choice than running a real tutor, Cunning Wish, and using part of the SB for it. But that aside, if you were just replacing Fact or Fictions with them the difference seems like it would probably be minimal or a question of preference.

I would tend to lean towards prefering Fact or Fiction, because you get to make the choice rather than your opponent, if for whatever reason they know what your holding from previous discard effect or something, then with FOF you can pick the two most powerful cards, where as with Gifts they will feed you the two least useful.

[Illissius]

Gifts is an interesting idea. I went with Intuition mainly because I expected to use it for finding a Deed, but that never happened. I did get triple Factories when I already had Loam, and while I don't think I got Loam and double Maze, that's only because I already drew one of them. (That's irrelevant if you don't have a hardon for the card like I do, though, and are running fewer copies). In any case, worth testing.

Gifts Ungiven would let you use Crucible-Academy-Petrified Field as your recursion engine instead of Loam. That sounds rather weak to me, but it's there if you want it. (Crucible is markedly more powerful at recurring a single Wasteland or Coliseum once you actually have it in play).

Mirrodin's Core seems really bad, but the problem is a valid one. I'd rather run something like a Bayou.

If you're using Loam instead of Crucible, wouldn't a single Dust Bowl be preferable to a single Wasteland? The mana and land requirements are similar, but Dust Bowl doesn't make you skip your draws and doesn't deck you. (Wasteland is more useful if you draw it randomly, though).

[jamest]

I've been running Intuition over FOF for a while now. But just as this thread is moving towards Intuition/Gifts, I'm moving back to FOF, because the emergence of Cephalid Breakfast will likely make graveyard hate more relevent in the format, and therefore graveyard-dependent strategys like Loam will get caught in the crossfire.

By the way, I think Intuition is better than Gifts, because it's one mana cheaper. I don't think the extra card that Gifts nets you is worth the tempo sacrifice, because once Intuition for the Loam engine resolves, you will get plenty of cards anyway.

[Illissius]

I'd love for people to board in graveyard hate against Loam*. I'll just beat them down with the 59 other cards in the deck.

* Other than Extirpate, but that's not usually an anti-Loam weapon anyways.

[jamest]

If you just have Loam, no one is siding in graveyard hate against you. But if you also have Monastery, Sandbar, Intuition ...

[Illissius]

One of my opponents in the Source tournament did board in Crypts and Furnaces against me (I was playing UGB Landstill with an Intuition engine). They didn't do shit. I loved it. I only used the Intuition engine in something like half my matches, anyways* -- and the only one where it was truly important was the Landstill mirror.

Monastery is a good point (I wasn't running those), but still, every single one of these cards besides Loam is still quite useful without a graveyard -- Monastery, Academy, Coliseum, and cycling lands tap for mana, and Intuition finds you a useful card (or pitches to Force). If my opponent wants to spend entire cards shutting off some secondary uses of some of mine, which I may not have used anyways, I'm more than happy to let them.

* Yeah, it wasn't great. Not bad, either, though. Still not entirely sure what the best way to fill the long term card advantage role after Standstill is.

[jazzykat]

Depending on how heavy you lean on intuition, or gifts Deep Analysis begins to look good. And before everyone goes, the loss of life etc. etc. consider your meta first it may be good for some and not others.

[jamest]

One of my opponents in the Source tournament did board in Crypts and Furnaces against me .... They didn't do shit. I loved it.

Maybe your opponent made a mistake boarding in gy hate against your deck. Maybe it wasn't a mistake and you got lucky. It's a one game sample size. But there are certain matches where you'll need the Loam engine (otherwise it's a mistake to maindeck it) and a greater presence of gy hate makes that engine more vulnerable.

If my opponent wants to spend entire cards shutting off some secondary uses of some of mine, which I may not have used anyways, I'm more than happy to let them.

If Monastery only tapped for mana, it'd be a pretty bad card. If there was no graveyard, Intuition and Sandbar would be pretty bad too. If I'm your opponent and siding in gy hate makes a bunch of your cards really bad (but not completely dead), then I'm more than happy to do it.

[blacklotus3636]

I recently acquired a tabernacle at pendrell vale. I know how everyone feels about interesting lands but perhaps tabernacle should be an exception to the rule. Its obviously amazing against aggressive decks like goblins, puts pressure on decks like thresh and happens to handle empty the warrens tokens pretty well. I understand cost being a factor but if it wasn't an issue should it be run as a 1 of?

[Tacosnape]

I recently acquired a tabernacle at pendrell vale. I know how everyone feels about interesting lands but perhaps tabernacle should be an exception to the rule. Its obviously amazing against aggressive decks like goblins, puts pressure on decks like thresh and happens to handle empty the warrens tokens pretty well. I understand cost being a factor but if it wasn't an issue should it be run as a 1 of?

No. It doesn't tap for mana and it doesn't do enough.

Empty the Warrens shouldn't be a problem for you, anyway, regardless of what Landstill build you run. Between Deed, Engineered Explosives, Crime//Punishment, Stifle, Spell Snare, Force of Will, and later Meddling Mage and Counterspell, you have a pretty damn good barrage of resources to handle Empty the Warrens.

Goblins Wastelands it. And if you have your Loam engine going and your manabase is solidified, not only did you live through the important turns and have a good chance of winning anyway, but Goblins is now developing the mana to simply pay for the goblins.

Oh, and, we don't lose to Threshold.

When you get right down to it, I can't think of a single match where I'd want the Tabernacle. If I'm going to play a land that can't even produce mana, I'll pick Maze of Ith.

[Anarky87]

I went 5-2 with the 4c list yesterday in the Legacy Champ Prelims, making 10th place out of 80 some people. My losses were to another UR Landstill deck, but I only got to play one game, as I got a game loss after a deck check showed I had left out the LftL (Which wouldn't have been so bad if I hadn't had to hurry through my registration because they gave the sheets out a minute and a half before collecting them). Then I lost to a U/G Thresh deck with MD Wastelands. I just got bad draws really too. I'm playing it again today, so I hope all goes well.