Flavor of the Month: Literary Landwalk
"A poem is a walk." --A. R. Ammons
Welcome to Flavor of the Month, where we build decks flavor first!
Longtime readers of this column (can I say there may be "longtime" readers? I've been doing this column for over a year, now, after all!); anyway, longtime readers will already know that I am an avid literary nerd and professional poet in my spare time (that is, my spare time spent writing about Magic), so when I first discovered this cycle of lands from Legends, I was particularly excited:
Poetry! Good poetry! Poe! Dickinson and Longfellow! The forest primeval! On Magic cards! Of course, I immediately found a home for them. I just happened to be building four Yoshimaru, Ever Faithful decks, one where he partners with each other nonwhite color, and what is effectively a basic land that also puts a counter on a quickly growing puppy is plenty good even if you never utilize them for anything but mana (which I almost never do).
(And if you're newer to the game and are wondering why you've never seen Karakas across the table from you, it's because, it's super, super banned. And always will be. Don't try to convince yourself Well, maybe it wouldn't be THAT bad--it is. If they started taking cards off of the Commander banlist one at a time, and they stopped when there was only one card left, Karakas would still be banned in this format.)
I love with the juxtaposition of a place in the Magic world with real-world poetry; it feels like a familiar entry point into the world of Dominaria, which was our only plane we'd seen at the time, like we're using more familiar emotional touchstones from our own reality to tell stories and set the stage for these new locales.
The best poems--and the best art, I'd say, including film, television, paintings, music, and so on--have a sense of discovery about them. The creator may have a rough idea in mind when they set down to create, but the art might pull them in a new direction as they proceed; learning to listen to that voice that tells you to pivot or explore elsewhere is one of the most important parts of learning to make great art.
Art is in many ways about discovery; say, reading a poem and looking up to find yourself in Pendelhaven or Hammerheim. A. R. Ammons famously said a poem is like a walk, and I'd like to follow that line of thought into a deckbuilding experiment. We should take a walk through some famous lands of Magic and remain open to wonder and surprise along the way.
Ingredients
With that in mind, let's set some simple rules for our deckbuilding:
- All lands must be legendary to keep us traveling and wandering to new, notable vistas
- All other cards must either be a legendary permanent or a two-sided card with a legendary permanent on the back to keep us open to the possibility of change in our gameplan at all times. Preferably both!
Can we stick to these stipulations and still make something halfway functional? Let's find out. I mean, given how much focus there is on legendary creatures, especially in all the Universes Beyond releases we're getting, it can't be that hard, right?
Something I learned when building my first Yoshimaru, Ever Faithful deck--a Rograkh, Son of Rohgahh-partnered Voltron deck that was so consistently oppressive that my playgroup gave it the playful nickname Paw Patrol--is that when your lands are counting toward your legendary tally, they add up very quick. With that in mind, I want to try out a new commander for this deck: Arbaaz Mir from the Assassin's Creed expansion.
With Arbaaz, we can literally count how many legends we told--of places, people, or noteworthy items...and we may just be counting down to our opponents' demise in the meantime as we shoot for 40. All the better!
Preparation
The gameplan of this deck is pretty simple: have nearly every card we play trigger our commander's ping ability. The more we can trigger it, and the more those pings can do, the better the deck performs. Having a bunch of lands also read "When this enters, deal 1 damage to each opponent and gain 1 life" is an advantageous place to start.
We've recently received two very playable cycles of legendary lands, from Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty and The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth, with the former cycle being multi-format all-stars. Turns out an untapped land that replaces a basic and has relevant abilities that can't be Counterspelled is pretty good; who knew!
All told, we end up with 25 one-sided legendary lands that are remotely feasible to play (no one is suggesting The Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale is reasonable for this deck), so I filled out the rest of our land slots with some two-color staples, like Sacred Foundry and Sundown Pass; given that a decent number of these legendary lands only make colorless mana, we can use all the fixing we can get. I'm also throwing in a few extra fetches to make sure we can hit a couple two-color lands, like the aforementioned Foundry or Elegant Parlor. So we've already broken our first stipulation, but I think it's a necessary break, and we'll stick to the rules from here on out.
Some other standout legendary lands include Shivan Gorge, for speeding up the clock when we have some extra mana lying around, Kor Haven, for ruining the night of the Gishath, Sun's Avatar player at the table, and Inventors' Fair, for fetching out important artifacts (and outside of creatures and lands, artifacts are our most common card type; in fact, in order to trigger Arbaaz Mir as much as possible, we're not playing any instants or sorceries; just permanents for us, bay-bee!)
Legendary cards that flip into other legendary permanents, like Chandra, Fire of Kaladesh, let us get twice the burn for our buck, and all legendary permanents being "historic" under the game's rules opens up some more synergies. Weatherlight not only pings on entering, it helps us refill our hand with more fodder. Peri Brown lets us discount literally any spell in our deck. Additionally, while we're not really focused on combat, a zero-mana Excalibur, Sword of Eden will feel pretty good, especially when swung around somehow (let's not think about the logistics) by Traxos, Scourge of Kroog. Or heck, give Rograkh, Son of Rohgahh something to do besides being a free ping!
We don't have to cast our legendary/historic permanents to get the damage from our commander; they just have to enter the battlefield and not be a token. With that in mind, it makes sense to do some light blinking with creatures like Phelia, Exuberant Shepherd, Gilraen, Dúnedain Protector, and Senu, Keen-Eyed Protector. We also have some ways to bring historic permanents back from the graveyard thanks to Teshar, Ancestor's Apostle and Layla Hassan for both card advantage and extra triggers from Arbaaz Mir.
Worried this style of gameplay will make you the target at your table? Fear not! Have Heliod, Sun-Crowned give Arbaaz lifelink to double your lifegain and watch your life total climb to unassailable heights, which, though I've never played an Assassin's Creed game, seems from where I'm sitting to be the main point of the entire endeavor, to climb higher than everyone else around for some reason (history is the reason, I'm gathering).
For the most part, we're keeping our mana costs pretty low; given that we have almost no mana rocks or ramp due to our stipulations, that's a necessity. Only a handful of spells are over three mana (and a few of the expensive ones actually have cost-reducers built-in), and we're leaning on cards that get better as the game goes on--that scale up, so to speak--like Mirror of Galadriel to offset the lower base power of cheaper spells.
Also, we can speed up the burn by getting more than one damage per permanent. Gandalf the White doubles all our pings, and Ojer Axonil, Deepest Might quadruples their potency; combine these two and we're walloping our opponents for eight every time a legend steps foot on our side. Don't even get me started on adding Delney, Streetwise Lookout...or Torbran, Thane of Red Fell...
That said, the single best card in this deck is just a single red mana. It's a 2/1, though I've never seen it do combat damage. And it's almost impossible to interact with; that goes for its controller, too. Guessed which card it is?
As anyone who's blinked and found themselves dead by the time they opened their eyes when facing off against a Purphoros, God of the Forge player will tell you that there is no more ruthlessly efficient way to trigger ETBs outside of an infinite combo than Norin the Wary. Almost without fail, for just the investment of a red mana, if your commander is out you'll be doming every other player for four damage and gaining four life every turn cycle. Where does he go during all that time? He's the one really on a walk.
Yield
Here's our well-traveled concoction!
That's it for today! I hope you enjoyed this little jaunt we took together. I don't have a fancy sign-off slogan, but what I do have is a fancy new MTG content channel I started just this spring; I hope you'll check out MTG Variety Hour on Instagram, Tiktok, YouTube, and Twitter (nope, still not calling it X) and say hi to me there. Until next time, thanks for reading!
