Another deck I thought about taking to that tournament in Columbus was a UGw build of Landstill I had built for a while.
See? This is how you can tell I’m not very good at Magic. Landstill isn’t even Tier 2 anymore. I mean, it’s not even played. At all! Ever!
However, I think green is underplayed and underprepared-for by the Vintage community at large and that the proper build could have some serious potential. Plus, it gives me the chance to post two, count ‘em, two decks for the price of one.
And as far as I know, that price is still free.
Anyway the first deck, actual UGw Landstill, is my own creation. It fuses the control elements of Landstill with the combo nature of Fastbond, Crucible of Worlds, and Strip Mine or Zuran Orb.
4x Wasteland
1x Strip Mine
3x Tropical Island
2x Tundra
1x Forest
5x Island
4x Mishra’s Factory
1x Mox Emerald
1x Mox Sapphire
1x Mox Pearl
1x Black Lotus
2x Treetop Village
3x Crucible of Worlds
1x Zuran Orb
1x Fastbond
1x Enlightened Tutor
1x Crop Rotation
4x Force of Will
3x Stifle
2x Mana Drain
3x Mana Leak
1x Chain of Vapor
2x Naturalize
2x Swords to Plowshares
2x Nevinyrral’s Disk
3x Brainstorm
3x Standstill
1x Ancestral Recall
1x Time Walk
That middle section, the one with the Crucibles, is the combo section. Any two of those things go pretty well together and lead to getting even more degenerate situations. This deck abuses Enlightened Tutor more than any other I know, especially since tutoring up Fastbond on your first draw step can do so much for you. Even better, Zuran Orb can be frustrating for any Tendrils player as you’ll suddenly have a lot more life to get through.
There’s really a lot of control in this deck, and I included Mana Drain even though there’s not always a lot of things to drain into. Crucible and Disk are your best options, but I say, hey, those are pretty good options. Stifle is really good in this deck as it prevents opposing players from using fetch-lands. Mana denial is very present in this deck, and it goes a long way to keeping you alive.
The major problem with Landstill, of course, is that it has a very slow clock. Not only do you have to find a manland to win, that land also has to swing at least seven times without being blocked or destroyed. You might be able to hold the board for a while, but seven turns is an eternity in Vintage. This is where running green helps, though, as a 3/3 trampler is definitely better than a 2/2 or a 2/1 flyer.
I dropped Standstill down to three in this because people are so much better at playing around it than they used to be. No, it doesn’t stop your opponent from playing spells, but it will deter them, especially if you have enough cards already in hand to reasonably threaten with Force of Will.
Probably if I consider running this, I’ll maindeck at least one Seedtime because that card just seems amazing in so many situations.
Actually, if I consider running this, I’ll probably also maindeck Tinker for Colossus because, why not?
The other deck that I’ve seen and subsequently promised above is one from the StarCity Forums called Lifecycle by its creators, Julian Bouchard and TekNaught. It uses much of the same engine as Landstill but has a more powerful finishing move in Vinelasher Kudzu, a rare from Ravnica. Vinelasher Kudzu is like Carnivorous Plant and Quirion Dryad had a baby and peed on it; rather than getting +1/+1 for spells you play, it gets the bonus for any land put into play.
The deck looks something like this:
2x Flooded Strand
1x Polluted Delta
1x Wooded Foothills
1x Windswept Heath
4x Tropical Island
1x Underground Sea
2x Island
1x Forest
4x Wasteland
1x Strip Mine
1x Cephalid Coliseum
1x Glacial Chasm
3x Vinelasher Kudzu
1x Black Lotus
1x Mox Sapphire
1x Mox Emerald
2x Null Rod
3x Crucible of Worlds
1x Life from the Loam
1x Fastbond
4x Exploration
1x Crop Rotation
1x Darkblast
3x Intuition
4x Force of Will
3x Daze
3x Stifle
1x Rushing River
1x Mystical Tutor
1x Time Walk
1x Gush
1x Ancestral Recall
1x Demonic Tutor
1x Vampiric Tutor
1x Regrowth
Psychatog decks rewarded players for doing things that were integral to winning at Magic anyway: playing spells. This deck does pretty much the same thing; only it rewards the player for dropping lands. Your win condition comes naturally out of doing what you’d do naturally, and it comes at a bargain price because it doesn’t start off looking like a win condition.
When I first saw it, this list looked a lot more like Landstill with a Life from the Loam and a playset of Vinelasher Kudzus thrown in, but it’s grown a lot since then and I like it a lot.
The more fetchlands the better in this deck, since early on they make your Kudzu grow twice if you have the lands to find with them. Unfortunately, with only eight fetchable lands and the insane amount of acceleration and card drawing that this deck sports, that opportunity runs out somewhat quickly. This is probably one of only a few decks that I could see playing one or two Ghost Quarters to bolster its mana denial plan of Wasteland and Stifle effects.
Regrowth, I think, is pretty good since it seems very likely that your opponent will counter that one important card: Fastbond. Fastbond is really good in this deck, obviously, but with the full compliment of Explorations and the means to find them, it’s not absolutely necessary to function at a high level. Plus, later in the game, being able to play three lands is just as good as being able to play all of them.
Goldfishing this on Apprentice shows that the Kudzu grows incredibly fast. It was mentioned in the forums that this probably didn’t need a playset of Kudzu, and I wonder why. I see that with the amount of disruption that Jacques LaPlante could be waited on and then protected for the win, but I’d much rather put them in the position of “I need to deal with this before it kills me” as early as possible, especially since the ability to play and recur lands drops significantly after they start coming out of your library.
I think for my own purposes, I would replace the black cards with white ones. White is easier to search up with blue and green fetchlands, and ads a much needed element of creature removal to this deck. Plus, I think you still get to tutor for the most important things with Enlightened Tutor.
Who knows? Perhaps I am wrong.
It just seems to me that the better way to deal with creature-heavy decks is to gain an arbitrarily large amount of life against them.
Also, I should point out that with the large amount of mana denial available in this deck, Daze is consistently amazing.
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