Legends Legends - The Lady of The Mountain
Welcome back, friends and enemies, deities and demigods, to Legends Legends! If you're new around here, what gives? We've been building Commander decks based around the original run of 55 legendary creatures from Magic's third ever expansion, Legends, for almost seven months at this point!
Seven months in, we're running quite thin on our remaining pool of less-than-stellar legendary commanders, and we're deep in the dregs of overcosted vanilla creatures with no lore to speak of.
Our latest legendarily mediocre creature is The Lady of the Mountain, a Gruul giant we're built to run out as many lands as possible, then use them to crush our foes in a landslide of falling rocks and timbering trees.
General Thoughts
The Lady of the Mountain is a six-mana 5/5 Gruul giant creature with no abilities and a paragraph of flavorless flavor text. Featured in the novel The Myth of Magic, The Lady of the Mountain is revealed to be an avatar-deity born from Gaea and Fier, two dwarven gods on Dominaria.
She's one of the only characters from Legends we can draw a direct line from to Steve Conard's D&D campaign, where he sourced many of the names and designs for characters from Legends. Conard's even gone so far as to stat her up for 3rd Edition, if any of you are interested in playing your own Legends-themed Dungeons & Dragons campaign.
This Commander deck ignores The Lady of the Mountain's dwarven connection and instead focuses on something we all love to do: playing lands. Our gameplan is, broadly, to play a ton of lands, trigger a ton of Landfall effects, then swing in at our opponents with an army of animated lands. Gruul lends itself easily to this theme, so expect to see some classic combos and haymakers. Let's dig in!
Ramp
The first step in most Commander games is to ramp. We've all sat down to a pod and spent the first few turns playing Sol Rings and Rampant Growths alongside our opponents, but our deck wants to continue ramping well into turns three, four, five, and onward.
Besides the usual suite of ramp spells we've become accustomed to in green (Cultivate, Kodama's Reach, Harrow, Rampant Growth, Nature's Lore), we're running a few larger ramp spells to burn our mana on well into the late game.
Reshape the Earth and Awaken the Woods are two excellent dumps for our 10+ mana we've accumulated by turns four or five, doubling or tripling our total available mana with one spell. Boundless Realms is another guaranteed way to swell your mana pool beyond comprehension.
Mwonvuli Acid-Moss is one of my favorite "ponza" cards, perfect for removing your opponents' problem lands, like Rogue's Passage or Cabal Coffers, while also ramping us. Broken Bond replaces the usual Naturalize we'd see in this deck, since it helps clear away those lands left in our hand that we can't fetch from the deck.
Speaking of clearing the lands out of our hands, we've got a host of creatures and spells that let us play additional lands each turn (which will work with any effect that lets us play them from the graveyard as well, see: Ancient Greenwarden, Conduit of Worlds, etc.).
Azusa, Lost but Seeking is one of the best value extra-land-droppers in the game; there's almost no way we can keep a hand full of land cards while she's on the field.
We're running Burgeoning instead of an Exploration in an effort to counter other players' ramp effects, keeping us ahead of them in mana so long as we have lands in our hand.
With Courser of Kruphix, we can skip needing an extra land play if we can just clear the lands off the top of our library instead of filling up our hand.
Finally, we're running Sword of the Animist, its evil, Phyrexianized cousin Bitterthorn, Nissa's Animus, and Staff of Titania, the perfect Equipment for The Lady of the Mountain to wield as she wades into combat.
Landfall
With all these lands entering the battlefield each turn, we'd be remiss not to run some Landfall triggers. In fact, we're loading up on Landfall triggers, since they're just about the best way to passively capitalize on our aggressive ramping without spending all that mana!
All of Landfall's heavy hitters are here: Moraug, Fury of Akoum, Akoum Hellkite, Avenger of Zendikar, [elLotus Cobra[/el], and Tireless Provisioner. We've got Ancient Greenwarden to double up on those triggers, too, of course. Both "land creature" lords are also here: Embodiment of Fury and Embodiment of Insight.
There are a few oddball choices we should justify, though. First is the unassuming Sporemound. Frequent Legends Legends readers will recognize that I'm a huge fan of the Sporemound/Life and Limb combo to drown the board in Saproling tokens, creating an unstoppable loop and drawing the game.
Next is Valakut Exploration, which is one of our best generic card advantage generators. By ramping once or twice in a turn, we can effectively dig through the top of our library and find more lands to drop (with our additional land play cards) and more Landfall and animation spells. The best part is those unplayed exiled cards turn into direct damage to each of our opponents at the end of the turn, returning to our graveyard so we can play them again with Conduit of Worlds or Ancient Greenwarden.
Primeval Bounty is one of my favorite reprints in Foundations - a 2014 Core Set powerhouse that rewards us for doing just about anything.
Finally, Zendikar's Roil is excellent for building up a base of 2/2 Elementals alongside our ramp effects.
Animation
Now that we've swarmed the board with lands and modestly pulled ahead of the rest of the pod, we can end things with our army of land creatures.
Nissa, Who Shakes the World and Nissa, Worldwaker are two of our most consistent ways to animate lands, turning them indefinitely into 3/3s and 4/4s, respectively.
Liege of the Tangle is our best top-end animator, buffing our lands into 8/8s, even if they've already been animated by a weaker effect.
Even though it takes a lot of set up, melding Titania, Voice of Gaea with Argoth, Sanctum of Nature into Titania, Gaea Incarnate is a game-ender right then and there, especially if we've used our Zuran Orb to mitigate any incoming damage all game.
We're running the Commander Legends Kamahl, Heart of Krosa instead of Kamahl, Fist of Krosa because the Legends version gives us a free Overrun effect, which'll be more useful in a deck that already has a field of animated lands.
Also note that Ashaya, Soul of the Wild's effect changes your other nontoken creatures into forest lands, which means they'll benefit from the land-lord effects from Sylvan Advocate and our pair of Embodiments.
Mana Base
Our red-green lands deck already runs a ton of ramp. Most notably, we're omitting the traditionally required Sol Ring, Arcane Signet, and Gruul Signet in favor of spells that actually put some of our 37 lands down onto the battlefield. There are a resounding 21 cards that fetch lands from our library to the battlefield, and that doesn't even count the number of extra land drops we can generate off of permanents, like Azusa, Lost but Seeking.
Budget
This The Lady of the Mountain Commander deck will run you about $240. There are a few cards that account for an outsized amount of that cost, so let's take a look at them.
Greensleeves, Maro-Sorcerer has both one of the most powerful Landfall abilities on a five-drop (compare it to Zendikar's Roil) and has the possibility to be one of the biggest creatures in our deck. That said, its single printing and high desirability in just about any green deck does drive its price up close to $20. Luckily, it can be replaced with anything cheap, like a Grow from the Ashes or Frenzied Tilling.
Burgeoning is the most expensive card in our deck, clocking in at about $30. Exploration can replace it for about half the cost, and as far as one-drop extra-land drops, it should perform about the same, unless you're staring down a similar ramp-heavy green deck.
The Lady of the Mountain Decklist
Wrap Up
Here's the deal: The Lady of the Mountain is nothing but a big creature to play with our extra mana in this Commander deck. That said, she still makes a unique commander for a Gruul lands-based deck, especially if you're sick to death of seeing Omnath, Locus of Rage decks every time you roll up to your LGS.
How would you build The Lady of the Mountain? Is there a Voltron-y build where we ramp out the ass before dropping a Firebreathing effect on her to shoot gouts of flame all over our foes? Maybe there's a Giant kindred deck hidden away somewhere in red and green! Let me know what you think in the comments!
As always, thanks for reading! I'll see you next time!
