Many of Magic: The Gathering’s competitive formats are in a bit of a bind. A few top-tier decks rule the roost, and the rest of the format is forced to conform to their ways. Standard is perhaps the worst offender, thanks to the all-powerful Vivi Cauldron combo deck. After completely dominating the Arena Championship, this deck looks nigh-unstoppable.
Fortunately, for MTG players who want a sandbox to experiment with, Modern has a lot of freedom for deck selection. Yes, some decks are certainly better than others, but the format is flexible enough that any number of powerful brews are capable of breaking into the winners’ metagame in any given event.
A rather unique Mono-Green lands deck has managed to do just that. The deck, essentially, tries to combine the power of land destruction shenanigans with a powerful Pioneer combo base, making it a new and exciting Modern strategy.
Mono Green Land Destruction
Land combo decks are nothing new to Modern. Amulet Titan has been around for years in Modern, and it currently has the highest win rate of any Modern deck. It’s only held back by how difficult the deck is to pilot properly, but there now may just be a stronger, simpler strategy to try.
MTGO user Franticore just placed second in a Modern Challenge with a unique Mono Green land destruction brew. It has a lot of cards that players are used to seeing in Amulet Titan or Eldrazi Ramp strategies, but the core cards in both decks are missing. Instead, we have a land destruction core that, ultimately, aims to destroy all of your opponent’s lands in one fell swoop with a big combo-esque turn.
The main land destruction tools for this strategy are Field of Ruin and Ghost Quarter, and they do a lot to take advantage of the current metagame’s state. These cards want to strangle your opponent’s mana, forcing them to put Basic Lands in play as quickly as possible. Thanks to the abundance of Fetch Lands in Modern, many top decks only run an average of three Basic Lands at the moment. Ghost Quarter can pop Basic Lands itself, making it so your opponent can no longer play Magic: The Gathering.
These cards combo exceptionally well with Icetill Explorer. Not only will Explorer ramp you towards your win conditions later in the game, but it can also recur Land Destruction effects like Ghost Quarter, squeezing your opponent’s manabase further. Between that and the abundance of Fetch Lands in your deck, Icetill Explorer will make it so you never miss a land drop. Best yet, since this is a graveyard-focused deck, Icetill Explorer’s mill effect works double duty, milling you towards a massive land reanimation turn.
Winning the Game
Unlike Amulet Titan and other similar Modern land combo decks, this one isn’t really trying to win the game by comboing with Aftermath Analyst loops. Your goal instead is to get a Spelunking into play and use Aftermath Analyst and Lumra, Bellow of the Woods to blow up a ton of your opponent’s lands in one go. From there, you can win the game slowly by swinging in with creatures.
There are a few ways to capitalize on having a ton of mana that aren’t land destruction, too. Kozilek’s Command scales in effectiveness as the game passes, but it can be a bit difficult to cast at times. Emrakul, the Promised End can end the game out of nowhere for surprisingly cheap thanks to all the Mill in this deck. Command, in particular, doubles as spot removal for problematic creatures like Psychic Frog.
Because of this, the trick with this deck is figuring out when to keep your lands to commit spells versus when to just start destroying your opponent’s lands. More often than not, you’ll want an Icetill Explorer in play as soon as possible, but after that, you just start trying to squeeze your opponent of resources.
So, while this deck may seem straightforward at first, knowing where to direct your resources can be tricky. Your mana does more than just cast spells, so planning ahead becomes a rather complex affair. That said, since using land destruction effects restricts mana for both players, you generally need to deal with threats before you start destroying lands.
An Incredible Sideboard
Being Mono-Green bizarrely unlocks a lot of powerful cards to employ in the sideboard. All of the ‘free’ Green spells are quite strong in the current Modern metagame, giving this deck an even better matchup against common strategies.
Force of Vigor‘s usability is at an all-time high. Affinity is a very popular strategy thanks to Pinnacle Emissary from Edge of Eternities. This card can punish the deck’s fast, but fragile opening sequences, potentially crippling the strategy from turn one. Follow that up with some land destruction, and playing Magic can become very difficult.
Endurance punishes the rise of Reanimator strategies in Modern and does double duty against other lands strategies, leveraging an Aftermath Analyst line. The creature also plays well into strategies like Dimir Frog that don’t necessarily want to reanimate anything, but also rely on their graveyard for Delve effects.
Veil of Summer protects your game-winning plays from countermagic and can be exchanged to protect your hand from Thoughtseize effects. It also protects your value generators, namely Icetill Explorers, from rogue Fatal Push effects. Dismember deals with problematic threats, and finally, Emrakul, the Promised End gives this strategy game against archetypes that can outgrind it. That said, I’m not really sure that those decks actually exist.
Some Matchup Roulette
While this Mono-Green brew has some game against many of the more popular decks in Modern, there are a few somewhat common strategies that this deck has little chance of beating. Extremely fast combo decks that don’t rely on lands, like Storm and Neoform, will be almost impossible matchups to win. Neoform, in particular, seems impossible to beat for this strategy.
On the other hand, you also have some matchups that are extremely favored, some of which are just byes. This deck hard punishes strategies that rely on lands, like Domain Zoo, Amulet Titan, Eldrazi decks, Urza’s Saga decks, and more. Tron and Belcher strategies, in particular, are almost impossible to win against using this deck since they have little to no Basic Lands.
It’s still early days for this land destruction combo deck, but it certainly seems like it holds some promise. Many notable MTG players are noticing a rise in Eldrazi and Tron decks, specifically, and are shifting towards some land destruction packages as a result. This likely means that this brew is more of a rogue deck for preying on a specific metagame instead of a tiered one, but it can, regardless, take down any tournament when your opponents bring the right decks.
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