With how busy the Magic: The Gathering world has been recently, it’s easy to forget that Aetherdrift was released less than two weeks ago. Hype for the set has been pretty much entirely smothered by reveals from Final Fantasy and Tarkir: Dragonstorm. Despite those goings on, Aetherdrift is still quietly working away in the background. Just yesterday, for example, new additions from MTG Aetherdrift made it into a League-winning Assault Loam list in Modern.
This isn’t a new archetype by any stretch. In fact, an aggressive Assault Loam deck won the first-ever Modern Grand Prix back in 2012. Since then the deck has been somewhat left behind, however, failing to make much of an impact in the evolving meta. With the help of these new cards, however, this now-obscure strategy could well find its way back into the spotlight.
What’s Assault Loam, Exactly?
Before we take a look at the new pieces from MTG Aetherdrift, let’s go over how Assault Loam works at a base level. Many players won’t have encountered this deck before, after all. Basically, the strategy revolves around the two title cards: Seismic Assault and Life from the Loam.
With these two cards and a few lands in your graveyard, you have an inevitability engine that will win you the game given enough time. Each turn you can get Loam back via Dredge, cast it to get three lands in your hand, then discard them to deal six damage divided as needed.
By itself this engine is powerful, but far too slow for Modern. To support it, players have tried all kinds of surrounding shells over the years. The GP-winning list from 2012 was essentially an aggressive Jund Midrange pile, which ran the combo as an inevitability engine. As time has gone on and support for land-based strategies has increased, Assault Loam has gotten more experimental.
Recent Assault Loam lists tend to run Wrenn and Six, for example, largely for that land-recurring +1. Some follow in the footsteps of their forefathers and run generic value plans, with Fable of the Mirror-Breaker et al. Some even push the boat out further and include Slogurk, the Overslime as effective extra copies of Life from the Loam. This is an evolving archetype, in other words, that has grown and moved with the times.
New MTG Aetherdrift Cards In Assault Loam
What does MTG Aetherdrift have to offer a deck like Assault Loam, with 13 years’ worth of brewing history behind it? Quite a lot, it turns out. In yesterday’s MTGO Modern League, Aspiringspike piloted a new take on the archetype to a 5-0 finish, running two full playsets of Aetherdrift cards.
First up we have Monument to Endurance. The power level of this card is no secret as it’s already seeing play in Pioneer and success in Standard. Turns out it’s also a perfect fit for Modern Assault Loam on top of that. The card rewards you for discarding up to three cards in a turn. Conveniently, this is exactly how many cards you’ll discard each turn with a single Assault Loam loop.
Getting extra draw, mana, and burn damage each turn is a huge boost for the deck. This card is so good, in fact, that Aspiringspike chose to build the rest of the deck around it. Their 5-0 list is very discard-heavy, running full playsets of both Street Wraith and Faithless Looting. These aren’t card you typically see in Assault Loam, but thanks to Monument they’re solid includes.
Speaking of discarding cards, the other Aetherdrift card making a four-of appearance here is Webstrike Elite. As a 3/3 Reach for two green, this is solid if underwhelming on the creature card. The real reason Aspiringspike chose to include the card, however, is its Cycling ability. There are a ton of cheap, powerful artifacts in Modern right now, and this is a great way to deal with them. Two green to draw a card and get rid of a Mox Opal? Sign me up! It only gets better if you have Monument in play, too.
A Mover In The Modern Meta?
Clearly, these new MTG Aetherdrift additions have helped Assault Loam out, given Aspiringspike’s 5-0 result. That said, one good result does not a meta-defining archetype make. Assault Loam is a deck with many weaknesses, which current Modern is all too happy to exploit.
Modern right now is dominated by pretty aggressive decks for the most part. Boros Energy continues to rule the roost, albeit with a smaller meta share than before. Assault Loam isn’t typically a deck that fights for the board well, and Aspiringspike’s new version is no exception. It runs no creatures outside Webstrike Elite to hold back the early hordes, and as such this is a pretty rough matchup overall.
The deck fares better against the likes of Eldrazi Ramp and Breach Combo. The former has enough build-up time to allow you to get your key pieces assembled. The latter, while potentially very explosive early, is also very vulnerable to artifact and enchantment hate. Snag an Opal or a Breach with Webstrike Elite and you’ll likely buy yourself enough time to push ahead for a win.
Even with all of that said, I don’t see Assault Loam returning to its days of tournament-winning glory any time soon. Relying on untapping with specific three-mana permanents in play is a shaky strategy, and Modern is likely too fast for it to get wins consistently. That’s not even accounting for graveyard hate, either, which is an easy way to completely destroy the deck out of the sideboard.
In any case, the deck is a fascinating blast from the past, however, and a fine showcase for Monument to Endurance. I’d expect that card to break a few more archetypes before all’s said and done.