Land Destruction – Post-Rotation Jank

Deck Standard

T1GlistenerElf August 21, 2019 8 min

While eternal formats are my preference, part of what draws me to Standard is the need to make a few archetypes work. Admittedly, they tend not to be the most pleasant things to play against, but I can't help but find myself drawn to making janky, formerly viable decks playable again. Thankfully, it's not a terribly long list:

Ports of archetypes from Legacy, such as Enchantress with Satyr Enchanter or MUD with the Karns and Ugin (fellow Team AetherHub writer Maechael1916 will feature my take on the list soon)
The most Infect-adjacent thing in the format
TurboFog, which is already a deck in Standard
Land Destruction

The lattermost may feature the most infamous playstyle in all of Magic's history. Denying your opponent a resource as integral to gameplay as lands is obviously going to lead to some asymmetric games, and WotC has rightly taken measures to prevent the deck from resurfacing often.

The easiest to notice, and the main reason that LD is difficult to make viable, is that they haven’t printed a three-mana spell that can remove any land into Standard in years, save for those that impose drawbacks like Assassin's Trophy. While four four-mana land destruction spells currently exist in Standard (Demolish, Rubble Reading, Seismic Shift, and Tectonic Rift,) and a few more expensive ones exist as well (such as Haphazard Bombardment), the fact that they cannot be ramped into by turn two hinders the archetype's viability. It's no secret that Standard has its share of fast and aggressive decks, from the ubiquitous Mono Red Aggro to Boros Feather to Arcanist Tempo to each and every tribal deck running around right now, and not being able to cut the opponent off from that third mana source means that they can often simply get off the ground before we have a chance to nail them to it. As if that weren’t bad enough, Elementals have Risen Reef, and the dozens of planeswalkers running around give the opponent options once they have already established as little as three mana.

This creates a new problem for us: we need to have viable interaction, enough to come back from a disadvantaged board and to stabilize, at which point we can claw our way back or start digging our opponent’s grave.

Beyond this, land destruction suffers from a similar problem that ramp decks in general can tend to suffer. From Mono Green ramp in Standard to Tron in Modern to MUD in Legacy, some games involve simply finding your means, such as lands; mana dorks; and Cultivate-effects, without finding your ends. If you simply don’t draw into your payoff cards, or if your opponent happens to deal with the few that you have, then you can find yourself out of luck. This is why it’s important to have a strong enough number of game-enders in your deck that you’re reasonably likely to find at least a few. However, having too many can water down other aspects of your deck. For example, since you need to spend your first few turns ramping, blowing up lands, and keeping the opponent off of their creatures, having too many payoffs instead can cause you to falter.

Of course, you’d ideally have cards that fill multiple roles. While the trade-off is usually that they are not as good at either role as a specialized card would be, the utility is often more than worth the diminished effect. Lands that serve as land destruction or win-cons, win-cons that serve as land destruction, ramp that serves as win-cons, interaction that serves as land destruction, etc. are all effective ways to keep your deck from running out of steam or lacking a needed option for a situation.

For an example deck from a previous Standard, here’s a list that I ran from Battle for Zendikar to Hour of Devastation:

Gruul Land Destruction - BFZ-HOU

Main 60 cards (19 distinct)

Lands - 26

Side 15 cards (7 distinct)