Land destruction is an infamous strategy as old as time. One of the worst feelings in Commander is setting up your mana, only to have your lands blown up and all of your progress undone. In Constructed, Ponza-style decks can be a nuisance to play against.
Well, yesterday, a dedicated Boros land destruction strategy put up a strong performance in a Modern tournament. This deck includes a healthy mix of powerful disruptive options but also utilizes a common that has yet to make a dent in the Modern format until now!
Main Gameplan
The goal behind this shell is very simple: blow up your opponent’s lands, mess with their board, and win the long game. You have a ton of ways to restrict your opponent’s mana. Most archetypes don’t play that many basic lands, so you can usually cut off your opponent’s ability to cast spells over time.
First, you’ll want to use effects like White Orchid Phantom to mess with your opponent’s nonbasic lands. Sure, they get to search for a basic land of their choice to replace it. However, when you add in other similar effects like Field of Ruin and Demolition Field, eventually, they’ll run out of basic lands to search for.
This is where your red splash starts to work its way into the equation. Cleansing Wildfire lets you blow up any land your opponent controls, including a basic. If they have no more basics to grab, you essentially got a discounted Stone Rain that cantrips out of the deal.
This deck goes as far as to play Geomancer’s Gambit as a support piece. Geomancer’s Gambit is more mana intensive than Cleansing Wildfire for the same effect. Yet, given how much you care about redundancy, even this inefficient common makes its way in as a four-of! This is Geomancer’s Gambit’s first major result in Modern in quite some time and just goes to show that even mediocre designs can have an impact in the right deck.
Other Disruption and Finishers
To supplement your land destruction package, you also have plenty of ways to keep your opponent’s board clear. Wrath of the Skies is perhaps the most important tool you have access to, especially against Mox Opal strategies and Boros Energy. Even if you fall behind, Wrath can successfully clean up everything you need it to. Galvanic Discharge does a good job picking off cheap creatures, and you’ll often get to store some Energy counters to maximize future copies of Wrath.
Any bigger creatures that sneak their way into play can be dealt with by Path to Exile. By running your opponent out of basic lands with your land destruction elements, you successfully mitigate the downside associated with this one-mana catch-all removal spell.
For disruption against spells, Reprieve is a solid option. It shines brightest versus decks like Living End. After your opponent casts a Cascade spell to dig for Living End, you can use Reprieve and strand the Suspend card in their hand.
After slowly cementing a mana advantage and working to keep the board clear, eventually you will need ways to finish the game. Magmatic Hellkite and Phlage, Titan of Fire’s Fury do a decent job of this. Magmatic Hellkite supports your main gameplan and is a beefy flier that can close games if your opponent can’t answer it. Phlage only appears as a one-of, but once you find it, you’ll be able to recur it and likely burn the opponent out.
Finally, a strange as it sounds, Castle Ardenvale does provide some inevitability. If your opponent is constricted on mana, creating an army of 1/1s will let you attack for the win in the long run.
Strengths and Weaknesses
Ultimately, Boros land destruction is at its best against archetypes that don’t feature a ton of basic lands and play to the board rather than focusing on a spell-based combo. You have a healthy mix of removal to keep the creatures from Boros Energy in check. As long as you can stave off early pressure, the combination of Wrath and land denial will pull you ahead.
While you don’t do a good job applying pressure, blowing up your opponent’s lands is a good way to stop the Eldrazi decks from gaining any traction. The same can be said for Belcher combo, where your land destruction is at its best.
You can run into issues in matchups where your opponent can win the game via a combo kill without needing many lands in play. Ruby Storm, for instance, just needs to land Ruby Medallion and their Rituals will give them the mana they need to cross the finish line. Ruby Storm also tends to play a high density of basic lands.
Reprieve is only a temporary answer, and Mana Tithe isn’t always a reliable source of counter magic versus a deck with Ritual effects. Your best shot in the matchup is to find High Noon out of the sideboard.
In most fair matchups, though, as long as you can keep problematic permanents like Planeswalkers off the board, you have a reasonable shot to win. If you suspect to see a lot of greedy manabases at your next Modern event, consider giving this deck a whirl to punish them.
Stick with us here at mtgrocks.com: the best site for Magic: The Gathering coverage!